


We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals

by Schistosity



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Assassination Attempt(s), During Timeskip (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route Spoilers, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I know those tags won't fill you with a lot of hope but I promise this will have funny bits, Minor Character Death, Poisoning, Politics, Worldbuilding, relationships are up to interpretation I've gone BUCKWILD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 51,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23079526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schistosity/pseuds/Schistosity
Summary: A year after the fall of Garreg Mach, fate begins to pull scattered friends back together. So what if one of them has to almost die to get it to happen?In which Claude is almost assassinated at his grandfather’s funeral, Lorenz is pretty sure he knows who did it, and Hilda is just here for the free buffet.
Relationships: Hilda Valentine Goneril & Claude von Riegan, Lorenz Hellman Gloucester & Claude von Riegan, Lorenz Hellman Gloucester & Hilda Valentine Goneril
Comments: 186
Kudos: 308





	1. Hilda I

**Author's Note:**

> “Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law  
> My services are bound. Wherefore should I  
> Stand in the plague of custom, and permit  
> The curiosity of nations to deprive me.”
> 
> — William Shakespeare, King Lear. 
> 
> [SLAPS TOP OF GOLDEN DEER TRIO] I just think they're neat!
> 
> [This fic has a playlist now?](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/69fR0vUdHgh50D0XIaTQyX?si=xtKxmummRLOKAwgNi4iUAg)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Claude dresses up and Hilda drops in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [vibe check!](https://open.spotify.com/track/3LG7mtWGvsOdo9s3EWKZbA?si=Ltxmao1WTSWtWeOge_bJgA)

There was nothing quite like a beautiful city in mourning.

Three years ago, Hilda had been forced to attend the funeral of Godfrey von Riegan in Derdriu. It had been a lavish affair; The whole city had been wallowing in the decorum of tragedy, flying black pennants emblazoned with crescent moons and Alliance shields in equal measure along every street and atop every roof.

The bells of the church had rung for hours and hours, throwing mournful calls to the swift ocean breeze, answered by the cries of elegant sea birds.

There had been an admirable level of pageantry to it all. Godfrey’s funeral had lasted for a full week of ceremonies; Hilda almost hadn’t been able to stomach the effort of attending service after service. 

Derdriu was a beautiful city indeed, even when it was sad. But it no longer wallowed in tragedy.

This was _war_ —this was the _Leicester_ _Alliance_ —and in the wake of the passing of Duke Oswald von Riegan, Derdriu wore its muted grief close to its chest out of necessity.

One must never show weakness in war, after all.

Duke Riegan had died on the twentieth day of the Harpstring Moon, finally succumbing to the illness that had ravaged him for almost a decade. News had it that it had been peaceful, that his grandson had been by his side, and that he hadn’t suffered.

Hilda wondered if that picture was just a little too pretty to be true.

The invitations to the funeral had been short and to the point, sent to the country’s four corners almost immediately, giving the lords only a few days to make their way to the capital. Time was of the essence, after all; The welcome dinner was tonight, the funeral was tomorrow, and the first roundtable with the new sovereign duke was the day after. 

No rest for the wicked, was that how that saying went?

“You know,” said Holst suddenly, drawing Hilda out of her thoughts. “If you frown like that, you’re going to get wrinkles.”

“Maybe I want wrinkles,” Hilda replied instantly, not turning away from the window, where she had been watching the sun-bathed streets of Derdriu roll past their carriage for the last half hour.

“You don’t,” her brother shot back, looking up from his book with a smirk. “However, I will say I think you’d be as lovely with wrinkles as you are without them. I just want to make sure you know you look like you’re trying to stare a hole through the window.”

Hilda sighed, consciously relaxing her expression, and sat up to face her brother. 

“Sorry,” she mumbled. “Just thinking is all.”

“If I’d known this trip was going to stress you out so much, I wouldn’t have invited you.”

“Uh, you _didn’t_ invite me. I invited myself.”

“Oh yeah, you _did_ , didn’t you?” Holst said, smirking in that annoying way he did when he managed to get one up on her. Hilda pouted a little harder and turned away.

Holst took her silence as an invitation to keep talking. “Well, I’m glad you’re here regardless. It’ll be good for Claude to have you around.”

“What? Like a playmate?”

Holst rolled his eyes. “Like a _friend_ , hopefully. Kid doesn’t have many of those anymore.”

The statement was pretty ominous, but Hilda didn’t have time to push him for an explanation as the moment was shattered by a sudden rap at the window.

“Milord? Milady?” she recognised the voice as her footman. “We’ve arrived.”

Hilda emerged from the carriage and stepped out into the mid-morning sun, blinking a bit at the change in lighting. Her eyes adjusted quickly and began to steadily trail up the hulking structure before her.

The Riegan estate was no royal palace, but it felt like it was trying its best to be one.

Years of holding the Alliance’s seat of power as their own had allowed the Riegan family to carve a sizeable home in the heart of the city. Located atop a hill in Derdriu’s centre, their family castle gazed across sprawling gardens to the harbour district beyond.

The castle itself was considered small by Adrestian or Faerghus standards, but it was one of the largest in the Leicester Alliance. A series of tightly nestled towers and ramparts hewn of warm, dark sandstone, surrounding a central courtyard, rose up before Hilda’s eyes. The entire thing was dotted with tall windows, allowing the structure to be opened wide on warm days such as these—inviting and open to the people of the capital, if not as defensible as the keeps of their southern and western neighbours.

There was a small retinue of people waiting for them just outside the entranceway, led by a man dressed in light armour. He was tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and a nasty looking scar on his forehead. He strode forward and bowed politely to Holst.

“Lord Holst!” he greeted. “I am Caius, the Steward of the Estate. It is my honour to welcome you to Derdriu.”

Hilda privately thought that he looked more like a guard than a steward, but then again, the Riegans had always run a pretty whackadoo household. This was probably par for the course.

Holst thanked him and Caius smiled. Then his gaze flicked to Hilda, recognition flashing over his face and replacing the pleasant façade with open shock. “L-Lady Hilda?!”

“Hello!” Hilda said with a wave. Holst chuckled.

Caius blinked in confusion. “We, uh, we were just expecting Lord Holst—”

“I’m here too!” Hilda said sweetly. “Is that okay?”

“O-of course! We’ll have to open up another guest room, but it shouldn’t be too much of a problem—”

“Awesome! It’s so nice of you to do that!”

“Of course—”

“Where’s Claude by the way?” Hilda said blithely, as if she was ordering something at a market and not demanding the presence of the most powerful man in the country.

And wasn’t _that_ a thought? Claude von Riegan, who she once watched drink the contents of their teachers’ inkwells like a line of shots because Leonie dared him to, the most powerful man in the country? They certainly were living in strange times.

“His Grace is busy,” Caius, steward-of-the-estate, said dryly, raising an eyebrow. “This is hardly the time for a social call, milady.”

Hilda smirked. “Oh, we go _way_ back, don’t worry about it. I’m sure Claude won’t mind if I just pop in to see him?”

She said it like a question even though it wasn’t one, and she was already moving out of the courtyard and into the entrance hall with Holst’s laughter at her back before Caius could think to respond. 

She managed to make it up the stairs without being stopped, but she was suddenly presented with the problem of being in the castle and definitely being lost.

The estate was… too big. Far too big and _very_ empty. After asking for help from about four different servants, Hilda finally learned Claude was apparently in the duke’s chambers, not his own—though Hilda supposed the duke’s chambers _were_ technically his now.

The chambers themselves were large, taking up most of the second floor of the castle’s east wing. Hilda was led into a sizeable sitting room with large windows overlooking the eastern gardens and the city beyond.

The room itself was refined in its décor; the walls were decorated with white and gold panelling, with lavish gold, green, and red tapestries draped across every available surface. The room was large but cozy. There didn’t seem to be a single part of it not taken up by an art piece or a sparkly chest or a cabinet of trinkets. Even the seating in the room, localised around a large marble fireplace, consisted of plump and soft-looking armchairs, topped with woven throw blankets and pillows.

A room like this—so _comfortable_ —painted a very different picture of the late duke, so often described by others as stoic and staunch. The overwhelming, inviting clutter of the whole place made Hilda wonder if Claude’s propensity for organised chaos back at the academy had been a genetic thing.

To the left was a private study and a meeting room, and to the right was the bedroom. The latest servant who Hilda had roped into her crusade bowed low and gestured to the bedroom door.

“His Grace should be inside trying on clothes for the dinner,” he said. “Though I would suggest knocking first, milady.”

Hilda, having no intention of knocking, dismissed the servant and waited until his footsteps had receded back down the hall before she all but kicked the bedroom door open.

Hilda Valentine Goneril had not seen Claude von Riegan in over a year, but the moment she opened the door it was like no time had passed at all.

He was standing at the foot of a four-poster bed, half-dressed in dark finery—black breeches and a loose-fitting black silk shirt, finely embroidered with tiny crescent moons. It was an impressive piece of design work, but it paled in comparison to the swathe of dress jackets strewn across the bed. Brocade and fine wool and velvet. A lot of velvet.

Probably too much velvet.

But despite his new clothes (and new beard?) everything else about him was familiar. He still had that tousled dark hair and honeyed skin and as he turned to her, green eyes widening in shock, the light glinted off his lone earring in a motion far more nostalgic than it probably needed to be.

“Hilda!?” Claude’s face broke into a grin. A _real_ one. Hilda had gotten quite adept at reading his smiles during their time at school—so many of them faked—and she trusted her instincts on the matter.

Claude smiled, real and bright, and some nebulous weight lifted off her shoulders.

Hilda didn’t know what to say, so she resorted to screaming like something possessed and throwing herself straight at him.

She leapt into his arms, already open and waiting for her, and squealed in delight as he held her tight to his chest, twirling her around. She kicked her legs up behind her like a little girl and laughed—harder than she had in a while—relishing in the weightless feeling as he spun her around.

He let her go and she bounced lightly on her toes.

“What are you doing here!?” he asked incredulously. “I thought your brother was coming!”

“He’s here,” Hilda assured. “But I wanted to come too.”

“Oh? Because funerals are _totally_ your scene?”

Hilda pouted, though there was nothing real behind it. “If you’re going to be ungrateful, I’m just going to go home.”

“And miss hanging out with me? Never. I know you too well.”

Hilda felt warmth blossom in her chest as they fell back into their old banter. It was such a familiar feeling; one she’d missed in their time apart.

Claude gestured to the bed with a nod, an unspoken motion for Hilda to take a seat as he continued to fiddle with his cravat. She obliged, falling back into the plump mattress and feeling the tension of several days travel begin to fade away. She sighed contentedly.

“I worry about you,” she said, tapping her cheek thoughtfully and staring up at the bed’s gold and green canopy. “Stuck here in this big old castle with a bunch of old farts who don’t like you…”

“You? Worried about _me_?” his voice was tinged with amusement. “Is that not tiring, Miss Goneril?”

“Of _course_ it’s tiring, Mister Riegan!” Hilda said with a mocking huff. “You should probably be grateful or something!”

“Or something,” Claude agreed with a smirk. Then his smile softened. “I’m always grateful for you.”

“Goddess—” Hilda rolled her eyes and shot him a glare. “Don’t be so sincere, Claude. It’s not like you.”

He just winked and kept fumbling with the tie.

Hilda watched him struggle for about a minute of contented silence before getting bored.

“You’re very bad at that, did you know?” she observed.

Claude yanked off the cravat with a huff and chucked it onto the bed.

Hilda, half on instinct, snatched it out of the air. She sat up in time to catch Claude rooting around in a large box for a new one. The one he pulled out and started trying to tie was white, with lace at the ends. It was nice, though Hilda didn’t agree with the impatient way he was attempting to attach it to himself.

“Like… _really_ bad.”

“I know,” he said with a plastered-on smile. “Would you believe this is the first time I’ve had to wear one?”

She probably wouldn’t have if she didn’t have a front-row seat to how badly his hands were trembling. That cemented it for her.

She understood in a way.

This leadership? This responsibility? It was all so _new_. As new for him as it was for her. As new and unwelcome as the war on their doorstep. She couldn’t help him with the leading… but she could help him in other ways.

Hilda sighed and got to her feet. She shuffled over to Claude and shot him an appraising once-over.

“See something you like?” he asked.

“Hmm,” Hilda hummed. “Nope. Move your hands, I’m fixing you.”

“Ooh,” Claude said cheekily, no hint of the previous tremor in his hands as he held them up in surrender “Are you going to help me look as _sexy_ as possible for this very tragic event?”

“Of course I am.” She rolled her eyes and smacked his hands down before they could mess up his cravat further. “You’re getting my undivided attention, you absolute disaster.”

He laughed again and Hilda could almost pretend, in that small moment, that nothing had changed at all.

With Claude’s clothes selected and appropriately mournful, Hilda managed to pull him away from funeral preparations for a tour of the estate.

(“Haven’t you been here before?” he asked. “Not since I was, like, fifteen,” she retorted. “I want to see what you’ve done to the place!”)

He showed her around his new chambers first, though his heart clearly wasn’t in it. He was very obviously more interested in the nice view over the city than anything in the room.

After that the tour became a bit livelier. He showed her down the hall to the end of the eastern wing, where a series of nice and relatively unused guest bedrooms were in the process of being opened and prepared for funeral attendees who were staying at the castle, rather than in town.

Claude showed her where she and Holst would be staying, their belongings already halfway moved into the rooms from downstairs. The rooms were nice, but the thin layer of dust on the cabinets gave Hilda the distinct impression the Riegan household hadn’t entertained guests in a long time.

Hilda took a quick peek into every open door as they walked, but it was the one next door to hers that caught her attention. Sparsely decorated, with two small suitcases at the foot of the bed, and a glimmering longsword propping the window open.

“Ooh! Who’s in here?” Hilda asked, poking her head in the door.

“That’ll be Judith,” Claude explained.

“Wait—Hero of Daphnel Judith? That Judith?”

“The one and only,” Claude smirked. “As you can see, she’s come armed to the teeth.”

 _Indeed she has_ , Hilda noted, realising that, upon closer inspection, the longsword wasn’t the only weapon in the room. Beside the suitcases, a silver bow lay next to a quiver of half-fletched arrows, and an array of daggers were lain out on the bed, as if someone had been halfway through sorting them.

“I wonder where she is,” Claude mused. “Probably off bothering the staff.”

“Is she planning on hunting them for sport?” Hilda joked. Claude frowned.

“No, but she might hunt me. I haven’t welcomed her yet.” Hilda wasn’t sure if _that_ was a joke. Judging by Claude’s grim facial expression, it might not have been.

“Okay. So we’ll avoid _her_ …”

They ran into Holst very quickly after touring the second floor. Hilda’s brother was still in the entrance hall chatting with the staff, and he visibly brightened when he saw Hilda trotting down the stairs with Claude in tow.

“Duke Riegan!” Holst said loudly, detaching himself from the attendant he was speaking to. As the duo approached, he swept into an exaggerated bow. “Thank you for _graciously_ allowing us stay in your _fine_ home.”

Claude grinned and matched the older man with an equally stupid-looking bow. “It’s my pleasure as always, General Holst.”

The moment held for a few seconds before both men broke down into laughter. Claude was suddenly tugged away from Hilda’s side and enveloped in a crushing embrace. It was all she could do to keep herself from laughing aloud.

“Look at you, kid!” Holst cried, planting his hands on Claude’s shoulders and spinning the poor boy around to face him. “You look _just_ like your uncle!”

If the statement staggered Claude in any way, he didn’t show it in more than an almost-imperceptible twitch.

“Really?” he said with a breathy laugh. “I hope that’s a good thing.”

“Oh, it is,” Holst assured, apparently oblivious to Claude’s small shift in demeanour. “ _Very_ charming and regal, that Godfrey—we used to think he was the coolest growing up!—but _this_ —”

He spun Claude around again, who seemed to have resigned himself to being tossed around like a ragdoll, and pointed between his beard and Claude’s new facial hair, looking to Hilda.

“He’s taking a leaf out of my book, don’t you think?” He grinned.

Hilda made a show of slowly deliberating, scratching her chin thoughtfully. Holst’s own rose-coloured scruff was a lot thicker than Claude’s dark stubble, stretching up his cheeks and chin and above his lips rather than just along his jaw. “That might be giving him a bit too much credit, Holst,” she smirked.

“Hey!” Claude protested. “I’ll have you know this took a while!”

“Sure it did, kid,” Holst said happily, finally releasing Claude in favour of giving him a pat on the back. “Keep at it.”

Claude huffed good-naturedly and took a step back, carefully extracting himself from Holst’s attack radius.

“It’s good to see you, Holst,” he said, schooling his expression back into his typical easy-going smile. “You weren’t at the last roundtable. Lord Albany said you were having trouble with spies at the border?”

Lord Albany, one of Holst’s trusted lieutenants, was often sent to roundtables in the Gonerils’ place when border conflicts grew too frequent to ignore. Hilda remembered the incident in question clearly; Two months prior, an Almyran messenger had been caught trying to cross the border ten miles from the Locket.

Holst had privately confided in Hilda after the fact that he was worried about Almyran spies in Fódlan—if not in the Alliance specifically. Hilda hadn’t been so sure, but Holst had been adamant that the messenger wouldn’t have fought so hard to destroy their correspondence before being cut down if it hadn’t been sent by, or intended for, someone important.

The incident had left the Gonerils stuck in their territory, fending off several new skirmishes. Albany had gone to Derdriu in their place, and it was for this reason that Holst hadn’t seen Claude in almost fourth months.

“Nothing too severe,” Holst said blandly. “Just worried about communication channels across the border. Boring stuff. I’m more sad I missed the conference. It really would have been nice say goodbye to the old man one last time.”

Claude smiles sadly. “I think he liked you a lot, Holst. If that helps.”

Holst chuckles. “I _know_ he did. The shit I could tell you about your grandpa would curl your hair, kid.”

Hilda brightened.

“Hey, Holst, do you want to come with us?” she asked. “I’m forcing Claude to give me a tour and you can tell us gossip about all the old dogs.”

Holst placed a hand over his heart and sighed dramatically. “I thought it’d be a cold day in Ailell before you willingly invited me somewhere Hilda, but I’ll have to decline. I’m supposed to be meeting with Margrave Edmund and Lady Cornwall for lunch.”

“The Margrave?” Hilda perked up. “Is Marianne with him?”

Holst shook his head. “He’s here alone. Folks over there are worried about their proximity to the Faerghus border, so he’s left most of his household behind.”

“For protection?” Claude wagered. “I can’t really picture Marianne leading anyone, but good for her, I guess?”

“Is Count Ordelia coming?” Hilda asked. This time, both Claude and her brother nodded.

“He’s supposed to be arriving with Gloucester and the other lords from the south,” Claude reports. “Edgar and… who is it?”

“Burgundy,” Holst supplied. Claude snapped his fingers.

“Yeah. Burgundy and a few others. Anyway, Lysithea won’t be with him, but you’ll never _guess_ who’s coming.”

He looked to her eagerly, and Hilda raised a tentative eyebrow. “Who?”

“Lorenz.”

Hilda gasped, whirling on Claude so quickly her ponytail snapped across his face, making him splutter weakly.

“ _No!_ Lorenz? _Our_ Lorenz!?”

“In the flesh.” Claude grinned, his eyes positively sparkling with mischievous light.

Hilda cackled.

“Okay, I’m _not_ getting involved in whatever this is,” Holst said. “Promise me you two will play nice with Gloucester’s spawn tonight, okay?”

“No guarantees!” Hilda teased with a wink.

“Fine. And you—Duke Riegan—No funny business, you hear?” Holst said sternly, eyes locked on Claude. “Look after her, okay?”

“Will do, sir,” Claude said with a salute. “But if we’re being honest, Hilda’s more likely going to be the one looking after me.”

“Too right,” Hilda nodded. “Hanging out with you is always so much _work_.”

Holst waved their banter off. “Okay well, don’t get in too much trouble. I’ll see you both at dinner.”

They began their departure, waving swift goodbyes to Holst as they started wandering back into the castle’s bowels, when they were stopped by a soft call.

“Hey, Claude.”

The duo turned around and met Holst’s gaze once more. He looked uncharacteristically somber, and it gave Hilda cause to frown in confusion.

“Listen,” her brother said. “No one is expecting this transition to be an easy one for you—except Gloucester, maybe, but he won’t be happy with anything you do—” this earned a small laugh from Claude “—I just wanted to let you know that if you need anything… House Goneril stands by you.”

There was an odd energy in the air suddenly—a strange shift in Claude’s expression that Hilda couldn’t put a name to. But just as quickly as it had appeared it was gone.

There was a moment of silence and then Claude bowed, properly this time, with one hand over his heart and the other behind his back. “Thank you, General,” he said, without a hint of his usual sarcasm. “I appreciate your offer.”

It was… very professional, all in all. It was a polite recognition of allegiance befitting a duke, and Hilda didn’t like it one bit. Formality was a mantle Claude wore surprisingly well, but it was also one she found quite alien on him.

Holst wasn’t as good at hiding his emotions as Hilda was, so it was easy for her to tell that something about Claude’s words had left him displeased. She didn’t have time to figure out what, though, because right away they were once again exchanging goodbyes and Holst was gone.

“Am I missing something?” Hilda muttered, mostly to herself.

Claude let out a sharp, amused breath, and shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s go. I bet we can snag lunch in the kitchens.”

They headed back inside, bouncing from the kitchens to the stables and eventually finding their way to the gardens in the central courtyard. They took refuge from the heat of the midday under a gazebo. It reminded Hilda of the one in the Garreg Mach tea garden, smaller, but similarly surrounded by flowering plants.

Hilda smacked Claude’s hands down from his cravat for what felt like the tenth time in as many minutes.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” She asked, drawing his attention to her.

He looked a little startled, a too-open expression that was enough evidence on its own that something was on his mind. “Sure?” he replied.

 _Are you sure you’re okay?_ Hilda wanted to ask. But she didn’t.

“Are you worried about inviting Ordelia and Gloucester?” she asked instead.

Claude rolled his eyes and turned away. “Why would I be?”

Hilda matched his eyeroll. “Don’t play dumb, Holst tells me about the roundtables,” she said, trying to catch his eye. He didn’t oblige. “They’re pro-Empire, aren’t they?”

Claude sighed and turned his gaze back to her. “Just because they want to keep trading with Hrym doesn’t make them turncoats.”

He didn’t sound like he believed it.

“Doesn’t it?” Hilda ventured, plucking a rose petal from one of the nearby bushes. It was yellow—good to know the Riegans were nothing if not thematic. “Holst said Count Gloucester called your grandfather a “spineless, kingdom-sympathising fool”. That doesn’t sound like someone who’s just in it for trade.”

Claude snorted.

“When did you become a politician?” He was trying to change the subject, but Hilda wasn’t about to let him.

She shot him a glare. “When I found out my best friend was about to become the sovereign duke? One of us has to pay attention. It’s frankly shocking that it’s me.”

“I am paying attention,” Claude said, a little sadly. “I just think a funeral shouldn’t be a partisan thing… We’re adults enough to hold off on tearing each other’s throats out until the end of the week, I should hope.”

Silence fell over the gazebo then. Here in the centre of the castle courtyard, the world was oddly devoid of ambient noise. The thick gardens muffled the sounds coming from the surrounding building, and the activity of the day had driven away any potential bird life that could have been living in the greenery.

“I just wish we could take a bit more time,” Claude mumbled into the quiet.

“How… how long would you want to take?” Hilda asked. She remembered Godfrey’s week-long ceremony, perhaps he was thinking more along those lines.

“My paternal grandfather’s funeral ceremonies lasted… three weeks, I think?” he said softly, as if the information itself was precious. “A bit excessive if you ask me but… he _was_ a pretty excessive guy.”

Hilda wanted to ask in what fucking world a funeral ceremony needed to be three weeks long, but she held her tongue. She’d learned a long time ago that Claude offered details of his childhood with great caution, and she didn’t want to spook him out of a potentially interesting story.

“That… seems like an awful lot of work for just one person.”

“He was well liked,” Claude said, and there was something deeper in the way he said it that Hilda couldn’t quite identify. “People put in more effort for people they like.”

 _What does that mean for Duke Oswald?_ Hilda began to see why Claude was so perturbed by the rushed nature of this funeral. What was it like for him? To have one grandfather apparently so well loved that three weeks are dedicated to his memory, only to follow him with the other grandfather, dead in a time of war, not even given three days?

 _It’s not very fair,_ Hilda thought. “How old were you?”

“When he died? Six or seven.”

“That’s… rough.”

A seven-year-old, surrounded by family, didn’t have to worry about a funeral. But that same boy, older, the last of his line, had to plan one. He was going to have to stand in front of all his grandfather’s friends and speak about a life he was only there for a fraction of.

“Yeah.”

Silence fell over them again, and Hilda felt a knot begin to twist in her stomach. She was confronted by that same strange feeling she’d picked up on during Holst’s odd exchange with Claude. She didn’t like how it was making her feel.

Hilda hummed. “You’re going to want to keep an eye on the liege lords anyway. If Count Gloucester starts spreading his sentiment before the roundtable it might get a lot more exciting. I for one am enjoying how boring it is around here.”

Claude leaned against one of the gazebo’s walls and cast an appraising glance at Hilda. “You almost sound like a real advisor, Hilda. I’m impressed.”

The tension broke.

“Shut up,” Hilda scoffed. “Don’t ever say that again.”

Claude grinned wide. “I can say whatever I want. I’m in charge, right?”

“You’re a duke, not a king.”

“Sure,” he said, too amused for his own good.

“Power has changed you,” Hilda teased. She swatted him over the back of the head for good measure.

Claude laughed. “So, Milady Advisor, you’re keeping tabs on us nobles, huh? Have you heard from Ignatz or any of the others?”

Hilda bit her lip. The tension was back. This was a conversation they were going to have eventually, but not one she had been looking forward to.

“No,” she said softly, no longer talkative.

Claude, bless him, picked up on this immediately. Concern marred his expression.

“They’re fine, Hilda.”

“You don’t know that,” she mumbled. None of them could know that. She hadn’t seen them since they’d left Garreg Mach over a year ago, sent spiralling to the four corners of the country with little more than swift goodbyes between them.

“I may not know it for sure,” Claude assured. “But I know Leonie is tougher than any of us put together, and I know Raph and Ignatz aren’t going to let each other out of their sight. They’re _fine_.”

Hilda sighed.

“Okay.”

She didn’t sound like she believed it.

They were wandering through the castle’s exterior gardens, drifting aimlessly through the low hedges and chatting idly as the sun lowered over the city.

“Do you want to see something?” Claude asked suddenly.

Hilda squinted at him.

“I dunno. Maybe? I have to get ready for dinner.”

Claude raised an eyebrow. “It’s not for three hours?”

Hilda planted a hand on her hip. “Yeah, three hours I have to spend tying myself into my fucking dress. Not all of us can throw a fancy napkin around our necks and call it quits.”

Claude raised his hands in surrender. “Do you want to see what I have to show you or not?”

“Of course I want to see it!”

Claude, surprisingly, led her back into the duke’s chambers. Instead of turning right into his room however, he turned left, unlocking the door to what Hilda vaguely recalled was his grandfather’s old study.

He eased the door open and beckoned her inside. Immediately, Hilda was assaulted by the sight of chests and boxes piled high along almost every wall. The place is a mess.

“Holy shit,” Hilda said. “Is this yours or his?”

Her eyes drift upwards, a witty remark falling dead on her tongue as she catches sight of what Claude had brought her in here to see. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the room.

_Oh._

“…That’s it, isn’t it?”

Claude followed her gaze to the far wall, where a bone-white bow sat on a wall mount above the office. The crest stone stared back, red and all-seeing. The thing looked untouched, and rightly so.

Hilda had never seen Failnaught before now, but she was intimately familiar with Freikugel. The lines of the bow, organic and eerie, sent shivers down her spine. She could almost feel Freikugel in her hand like a phantom… almost see the curves of inhuman bones under her fingers.

Failnaught was much the same as her family’s axe: just-to-the-left of human-looking, with spines and ridges that could, perhaps, be ribs in another world. She supposed she should be grateful it wasn’t human—she probably couldn’t stomach it if it were.

It was unsettling all the same.

“Yeah,” Claude said softly. “That’s her.”

“Why is it here and not…” _With you? In your room? On your back, like your old bow was every day?_

Claude seemed to catch her drift. “The old man was keeping it locked up,” he explained. “I don’t think he wanted me to have it.”

Hilda knew some Relic families were picky about who got what and when. She knew Sylvain wouldn’t have laid hands on the Lance of Ruin until much later in life if it hadn’t almost literally fallen into his lap. She knew the Gloucesters had some kind of stupid prerequisite for theirs, too. Holst foisting Freikugel onto her while she was still at school had been an anomaly—most noble families were stingier than that.

But even so, there was something in the way Claude said it that rubbed her the wrong way.

“What do you mean he didn’t want you to have it? I was sorta under the impression he liked you.”

“He did… I hope… I just think he thought I wasn’t ready for it.”

 _Do you think you’re ready for it?_ But she didn’t ask that.

“Have you shot it yet?” Hilda asked instead.

There was an odd set to his jaw as he said, “No.”

Hilda didn’t think there was anything she could really say.

So, she didn’t speak, she just hugged him again. 

It had only been a year, but he was so much taller than he had been. Blame it on boys to shoot up without warning. She had to get up on her toes to reach him now, looping her arms around his neck in a tight hug until she was almost hanging off him.

She felt a deep thrum of laughter reverberate through his chest as he brought his arms up, wrapping them around her to match her embrace.

She squeezed a little tighter. He did too.

“I missed you a lot you know,” she said, voice muffled in the soft collar of his shirt. His clothes were new and so very unlike his old ones, smelling of soap and air and not much else.

But Claude was the same, with his unreasonably nice skin and broad shoulders and a lingering scent of rosin. It was familiar, underneath all the unfamiliar trappings of his new station.

“I missed you too,” he said.

They stood there for a moment, letting the dust of a year and a half’s distance finally settle around them. Hilda hadn’t really realised how much she’d missed him. She wondered if he was realising the same thing.

She leaned back and placed her hand on his cheek, feeling the roughness of new stubble. From here she could see more recent additions to his face: a small scar on his lip, a sharper line to his jaw, heavy bags under his eyes only slightly concealed. His braid was gone. How had she not noticed that before?

She wondered if he saw the same marks of change in her. Did he see the new muscles in her shoulders, built from months of training? Did he feel her calloused fingers, more work-hardened than they’d ever been in the years he’d known her?

He wore his title well from a distance, as did she. Hilda knew it would be impossible to see the cracks in their masks from anywhere farther away than where they were standing right now.

“I’m so sorry, Claude,” she said.

“Thanks… but, I didn’t really know him that well.”

“I’m not talking about your grandfather,” she said, even though she sort of had been. “I’m talking about… everything.”

She gestured all around her; to the desk, sat at by so many leaders before him; out the door to the bedroom, where a bed too large for any one man stood unslept in; to the boxes and chests obviously brought by Claude himself, only half unpacked as their owner settled his new life into the spaces left behind by a dead man.

To the bone-white bow, looming above them like a red-eyed spectre of terrible expectation.

That feeling was back—that strange energy. It was that same feeling she’d seen roiling between him and Holst earlier, though now she could finally put a name to it.

Claude was _lonely_ , achingly so, and Hilda chided herself for not having noticed it before Holst of all people had. His offer— _House Goneril stands by you—_ hadn’t been one of political support. No. It had been a personal promise, a shoulder to cry on if needed, a welcoming hand outstretched to a young man who’d just lost the last shred of family and guidance he had in the Alliance. 

A big lonely house belonging to only him, full of people who didn’t care. A young man alone, writing eulogies for a grandfather he didn’t know.

 _It’ll be good for Claude to have you around,_ Holst had said.

 _Like a friend,_ he’d urged of her. _Kid doesn’t have many of those anymore._

“It’s too much too soon,” she said. He smiled a wan smile.

“Yeah, well—I wanted this, Hilda… this is the whole reason I—” he sighed, shook his head like he was clearing it. “I _want_ to lead.”

“I know,” she mumbled. “I just think we all wanted it to be under more peaceful circumstances.”

“We don’t get to choose that.”

“No, but we do get to complain about it.”

He smirked, a little more honest this time.

Hilda took a step back and gathered his hands in hers. “Holst meant what he said, you know,” she said. “He’s here for you, and so am I… if you need anything—anything at all—you can come to me. You know that, right?”

He nodded.

“Okay,” she said softly. “And thank you, Claude, for trusting me.”

“Thank _you_ for, I dunno, not freaking out?” he laughed at himself. “I’m trying to keep it together.”

Hilda shook her head. “If anyone deserves to be freaking out right now it’s you.”

“I—”

There was a knock on the open door and the duo started. They spun around to see an out-of-breath servant girl standing in the doorway, looking terrified.

“Your grace,” she bowed low to Claude. “A-apologies for the interruption but we’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

That was probably Hilda’s fault, but she didn’t say anything.

“You found me,” Claude said, putting on that too-formal smile again. “Where’s the fire?”

The woman, apparently done panting, stood up, holding out both hands, clutching napkins. “We are seeking advisement on the colour of the napkins for the dinner, your Grace. Would you prefer gold or green?”

Claude and Hilda shared a quick, confused glance, before Claude reluctantly answered.

“Uh… gold?”

Hilda slapped his shoulder derisively. “No!” she squawked and turned to the servant woman with a sweet smile. “He’d prefer the green, actually.”

The woman, apparently just now realising she’d walked in on something, nodded and ran off.

They watched her leave in amused silence.

“Why not gold?” Claude asked dryly.

Hilda scoffed. “This is a funeral, Claude, not a children’s birthday party. Have some tact.”

“Gods,” Claude sighed wistfully, looking down at her with open admiration and more than a little teasing in his eyes. “I’m so fucking glad you’re here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that this chapter was 5k words of Hilda and Claude chatting in various fancy locales, but this fic has a capital-P Plot and I needed to set it up so that meant a setting tour and Too Many Name Drops! hhh c’est la vie.
> 
> The next chapter should be up some time tomorrow because I’m not going to continue to deprive you of angst OR Lorenz, so be warned it has both in equal measure.
> 
> More notes:  
> I know it’s not super-duper canon, but I like the idea that Holst is very friendly with Claude. He’s my sister’s best friend? Check. He’s Tiana’s son? CHECK. Meanwhile Claude’s taking it all in stride thinking “The comedy value of getting this man in the same room as Nader is something I would gladly die for.”
> 
> The Riegan estate is loosely based on Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, England, because that’s… appropriate. If you’d like visual references for what the exterior AND interior aesthetics of our imaginary Riegan estate are I’d recommend giving Belvoir a peep!


	2. Lorenz I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which dinner goes sideways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I take the hammer and HURT the baby!
> 
> [vibe check!](https://open.spotify.com/track/4UkynNKM3QAFnYukL8Udi6?si=mo3nmuWURIiiPS-oGyfP7A)

The Gloucesters arrived at the Riegan estate as fashionably late as they could without being rude.

The castle was already open and lit from within, though the sun had set, the sheer number of lights within the structure shone through every window like localised stars, growing brighter and brighter as they approached.

Their small party was met outside by a scarred man with salt-and-pepper hair in a steward’s uniform.

“Welcome, Count Gloucester,” said the man, bowing low. “Please come in, the dinner is just about to begin.”

Lorenz Hellman Gloucester kept his head down the whole way through the castle’s halls, making eye contact with no one. If his father had a problem with this blatant act of discomfort, he didn’t show it.

A small mercy.

“I want you there,” his father had told him almost immediately after receiving the invitation.

“Why?” he’d asked.

“I need your assessment of the boy—” he never called Claude by name in private company “—he won’t be inclined to talk to me, but he might talk to you.”

“Mm,” Lorenz had said. It hadn’t technically been a yes; a caveat he was staking most of the trip on.

The steward who met them outside, a man named Caius, ushered Lorenz, his mother, and father down several first-floor passageways before they arrived at the large oaken doors that led to the dining hall. The sounds of conversation spilled out of the door, but it was what was standing just beyond them that caught Lorenz’s attention.

Standing just inside the entrance to the dining hall were the two people Lorenz had been most eager—and most hesitant—to see.

Hilda and Claude were greeting guests as they arrived, looking like visions of elegant grief in ornate black finery. Hilda was dressed in a floor-length black gown, made of presumably hand-sewn silk and lace, with a more modest neckline than Lorenz had ever seen her employ in her free time at school. Claude was likewise dressed well, in a black brocade jacket and, surprisingly, a cravat. Lorenz hadn’t realised the man was capable of dressing himself like a proper noble. Mark him surprised.

They both looked so different, yet just the same. How odd.

Beside him, Lorenz’s mother gasped.

“Goddess, Dorian. He looks just like Godfrey, doesn’t he?” she whispered. 

“I suppose,” said Count Gloucester in a low voice, sounding very unamused.

Lorenz looked to his father quietly, assessing his expression. The man was nothing if not stoic, but Lorenz saw his lips purse a little at his wife’s words. Indignation?

Lorenz’s eyes drifted back to Claude, who was now talking with a tall, dark-haired woman in Alliance golds and—was that a sword? Never mind.

The young duke certainly looked very different from how he had styled himself at the academy, and Lorenz wondered how much of that was permanent and how much was put on for the funeral. His hair was a little longer, slicked back and only a little unruly, and his braid was nowhere to be seen. His clothes were tightly tailored, fitted to his frame and very unlike the flexible archer’s clothes he’d practically lived in for a year.

Lorenz had met Claude’s late uncle a few times, enough to recognise that his mother had probably been referring to Claude’s manner of dress rather than any glaring genetic similarities. The comparison still seemed to irk his father, though; he was a man so angered by Claude’s presence in the Riegan family tree it was a wonder he hadn’t tried to cut the whole thing down.

 _Except he did try,_ a voice in the back of Lorenz’s mind said. _You know he tried._

“I daresay we go greet our host,” Lorenz’s father said suddenly, snapping his son out of his spiralling thoughts. “Lorenz?”

“Y-yes, father?”

“Let’s go.”

The Gloucester party drifted forward and, as they approached, Lorenz saw his former classmates in more detail.

Hilda was chatting idly to Claude and the older woman. None of them noticed the Gloucesters’ approach. Hilda was holding what looked like a stolen plate of canapés, and was busying herself with stuffing them in her mouth in between remarks.

Claude was laughing, and Lorenz caught the glint of that familiar earring. Well, that was a bit of a disappointment. Lorenz had always told him it was inappropriate of a man of his station—he supposed it was a bit too much to expect Claude to absorb all of his lessons.

“Lady Daphnel,” Lorenz’s father said, bowing shortly to the woman. Her hawk like eyes swept over the group for a second, briefly catching Lorenz’s and making him squirm just a little. Now that his father had put a name to her face he recognised her—Judith von Daphnel, a war hero and a woman Lorenz didn’t want to cross. 

“Count Gloucester,” she drawled, the corner of her mouth curling into a dry smirk. “Nice to see you, finally. We almost thought you weren’t coming.”

“We?” the Count repeated and raised an eyebrow. “I presume Francis has lost a bet then?”

“He has,” Judith said. “I suppose I’ll be off to collect. Boy—” she placed a hand on Claude’s shoulder “—I’ll talk to you later.”

Claude looked a bit perturbed at her word choice, but saw her off politely before turning back to the Gloucesters.

“Count Gloucester, Lady Gloucester,” he said warmly, though his eyes held none of his words’ softness. “Thank you so much for making it.”

Count Gloucester was a tall man, much more so than even his son. He was at least a head taller than Claude, who hadn’t grown more than a few inches in the last year, and seemed to tower over him in more ways than one.

Claude, to his credit, didn’t flinch as Lorenz’s father loomed over him.

“Your Grandfather was a force to be reckoned with,” the Count said with a stern expression. “His presence will be missed at the roundtable. I am, however, pleased to see the Riegan line continue through you.”

A bold-faced lie, but a well-executed one. Lorenz knew it would be a cold day in Ailell before his father would be pleased with the actions of a Riegan.

“Thank you,” Claude said, eyes shining with that clever, foreboding light they always had when he was scheming. He bowed at the waist, one hand over his heart in the proper style—Lorenz shouldn’t have been impressed, but it was nice to see his nagging back at the academy had somewhat sunk in. “Your support is much appreciated in this trying time.”

Lorenz watched Hilda, whose eyes were darting back and forth between the two men, pop another canapé and her mouth with the air of someone watching a particularly engaging theatre production.

Without waiting for the Count to respond, Claude swivelled to face Lorenz.

“Lorenz! I’m glad to see you here, too.”

“Likewise, Claude,” Lorenz said, recovering from his discomfort smoothly. “I see you’re still as untidy as ever.”

Claude scratched at the stubble along his jaw and laughed. “I’ll have you know some people would call this _ruggedly_ _handsome_ , but it’s good to see you haven’t changed.”

Lorenz hoped that wasn’t true. He’d like to have changed in their year apart. Recent events had him looking back on his behaviour at the academy with a shameful air.

“Lorenz,” Count Gloucester said. “I will find our seats. Do not make me wait.”

“Yes, father.”

“Lady Goneril.” Lorenz’s parents gave Hilda only a passing glance and a swift bow before making their exit.

“What a dick,” Hilda said, popping yet another canapé in her mouth. “I don’t know how you put up with him, Lorenz.”

“He is my father,” Lorenz said. _As if that’s a real answer_ , said the voice in his head.

Hilda shrugged and held out the plate. “Canapé? It’s good to see you.”

Lorenz waved the food away.

“He can be… difficult,” Lorenz said. “I can’t say I agree with everything he does.”

Claude’s eyes widened comically. “Woah, wait! Was that an admission? Lorenz! That’s more youthful rebellion than I ever managed to get out of you back at school.”

“Maybe you have changed, Lorenz,” Hilda said brightly.

 _I certainly hope so,_ Lorenz thought.

Claude tapped his chin thoughtfully. “You haven’t been at any of the roundtables. I think I might have missed you.”

“Might have?” Lorenz smirked, relishing quietly in the realisation their argumentative banter hadn’t been soured by time. “It doesn’t bode well for a duke to be indecisive.”

Claude laughed. “Okay fine, we missed you.”

Hilda grinned, and Lorenz felt something heavy in his heart loosen for just a moment in the face of his two classmates.

But moments never lasted.

There was the sound of a throat clearing behind him, and Lorenz spun on his heel to see the tall, red-haired figure of Lady Cornwall—a minor lord, smiling a little impatiently at him.

“Pardon me, Lord Gloucester,” she said. “But I can’t have you hogging the duke all night.”

Of course! Claude had been doing door greetings. Lorenz flushed and gave her a short, apologetic bow.

“Apologies, Lady Cornwall,” Lorenz said before righting himself and turning back to Hilda and Claude. “I must take my leave.”

“See you later then,” said Hilda, looking a bit put out.

“Yeah,” said Claude. “Meet us after, we can have tea or something.”

The Riegan estate’s dining hall was huge, equipped for holding the crowds that usually gathered for Roundtable conferences. It had lovely vaulted ceilings and a wall of windowed doors that opened onto a veranda and a lush exterior garden outside. It was beautiful, but its décor was a bit more subdued that usual.

The green napkins were a nice touch.

Lorenz found his father and mother at a table close to the veranda doors. He approached a seat next to his mother, observing his father, who was already embroiled in a discussion with their table mates.

Lord Edgar, a minor lord under his father, seemed to be the only one actually invested in the discussion. Count Ordelia, who was for some reason sitting with them, looked positively bored sitting next to a distracted Lord Burgundy.

“—if we don’t push for tariffs, Her Majesty will eventually see it as admission of sympathy,” his father was saying.

“I agree, Dorian,” Edgar replies, brushing his stringy dark hair out of his eyes. “But you know the boy won’t go for it.”

“The boy won’t go for anything,” Count Gloucester snarled. “Not after a year of cavorting around with those Faerghus mutts at the monast—”

“Good evening, Lorenz!” Count Ordelia spotted Lorenz approaching and called out a little too loudly, planting his hands on the table hard enough to jostle the cutlery. Edgar and Lorenz’s father pouted at the interruption. “I saw you speaking with the duke? Is he well?!”

Lorenz gaped like a fish in the face of Ordelia’s outburst. Lord Burgundy stifled a laugh.

“He’s, uh, he’s well…” he managed to say.

“Good. I’m glad.” Count Ordelia punctuated his statement with a too-long swig of wine.

Lorenz decided to focus on the Count as he sat down, as it was easier to look at Lysithea’s father’s frazzled and disinterested expression than his own father’s judgemental one.

He looked profoundly uncomfortable at this table. Lorenz had no idea why Claude’s staff had placed him here.

Count Ordelia didn’t look much like his daughter beyond their shared eye colour. Lorenz wondered, not for the first time, where Lysithea had gotten her white hair when both of her parents were so dark-haired.

The conversation became blessedly devoid of gossip for a few minutes as the last of the guests filtered into the space. Lorenz spent most of it talking to Count Ordelia about Lysithea’s wellbeing, as the poor man had been almost chomping at the bit for an excuse not to become involved in Count Gloucester’s conversation.

Count Gloucester tapped the table impatiently, eyes scouring the room. “Lady Tiana’s absence is once again _glaring_ ,” he remarked.

Lorenz’s mother rolled her eyes at her husband. “You didn’t honestly expect _her_ to come, did you dear?”

(Count Ordelia put his head in his hands and sighed, a motion that apparently went unnoticed by everyone but Lorenz and Burgundy, who gave the man a consoling pat on the back.)

“I thought perhaps a good daughter would want to attend her father’s funeral, having so deftly avoided her brother’s,” Count Gloucester huffed.

Edgar scoffed, taking a sip of wine. “It’s amusing you think she’d show face.”

Lorenz let the discussion wash over him.

Count Gloucester’s incessant snooping into Claude’s private life had finally born fruit five months prior. Lorenz—fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you asked—had been there to witness the fallout.

He’d been there to finally learn the truth.

Count Gloucester and his allies had been operating under the assumption that Claude was a legitimized bastard of Godfrey’s. While he hadn’t been presented as such, the fact Tiana von Riegan had been missing and presumed dead for over twenty years was more than enough to sow seeds of doubt among the southern nobility that she was actually his mother, as Duke Oswald had claimed.

But then one of Gloucester’s spies had returned from Derdriu, a letter in hand, stamped with Tiana’s personal seal.

“She’s alive,” Lorenz’s father had said, voice even. “Or at least she was a year ago.”

The letter hadn’t held anything of substance, just a vague check-in, presumably coded. Overnight, in Gloucester’s eyes, Claude had gone from Godfrey’s bastard to the legitimate son of a missing noblewoman. The whole thing smacked of conspiracy and mystery, which had raised the Count’s hackles like a hunting dog smelling blood.

But Lorenz couldn’t bring himself to care, because the revelation of Tiana’s survival had come with a far more sinister revelation regarding Godfrey’s death.

Lorenz took a sip of his wine, not bothering to savour the taste in the slightest. His eyes were locked on his father, watching him as he watched the new duke. His dark eyes, echoes of Lorenz’s own but so much colder, tracked the young man with all the intensity of a predator.

 _He looks just like Godfrey,_ his mother had said of Claude. 

_So are you going to try to kill him, too, father?_ Lorenz thought.

His father had never said it outright, but he hadn’t needed to. Evidence had begun to stack up until it was undeniable. Not only had Lorenz’s father orchestrated the circumstances that had led to the deaths of Raphael’s parents, he had done it all in order to kill the Riegan heir. And he had succeeded.

It was funny, in a way, Lorenz had thought one night. He had been staring up at his bedroom ceiling and had thought, in between mental replays of every unfounded and awful thing he’d said to Claude at school, that he probably never would have _met_ Claude if it hadn’t been for his father’s meddling. Claude would still be wherever it was his grandfather had magicked him from and Lorenz would still be here. He would have probably been the leader of the Golden Deer House, too. Wasn’t that a thought?

Lorenz’s father had, through action of his own, neatly set the stage for the arrival his own worst enemy. Lorenz wondered if his father ever regretted what he’d done. Did he miss Godfrey, in a morbid sort of way?

Because Godfrey wouldn’t have been the unknown element Claude was. Godfrey wouldn’t have been oh-so slightly _foreign_ as his nephew, in his ideals and schemes and the colour of his skin. Godfrey wouldn’t have antagonised the Count like his nephew did. Godfrey wouldn’t have been a young idealist, a hapless flirt, or a trickster.

Lorenz watched his father’s jaw clench as Claude got to his feet.

The duke stood at the front of the room and waited for silence. It fell quickly.

If Lorenz had to commend Claude for anything, it was his ability to command a room. It had been admirable back at the academy, but it had only grown in skill over the last year.

The room fell silent, and Claude spoke.

“We’re gathered here tonight to celebrate a life,” he began, “and to mourn its loss.”

He paused for a second, eyes sweeping over the crowd, before he continued.

“I don’t have any funny anecdotes or stories to tell you about my grandfather—Holst would be the better person to ask about that.” He raised his champagne flute in the direction of Hilda and Holst’s table, the man in question gave a little nod, which earned a few laughs.

Lorenz’s father remained impassive.

Claude visibly sobered, the smile slipping a little off his face. “Though I am proud to have come to consider him one of the most important people in my life, I didn’t have the privilege of truly knowing my grandfather until much later in my childhood than a usual grandchild might.

“But he wasn’t unfamiliar to me. Because while I didn’t know him as a child, I saw echoes of him every day in his daughter—my mother, who taught me the same honour and respect her father had taught her. So, when I came to meet him later, I felt as if I’d already seen a part of him, already learned something from him. That’s what my grandfather really was at his core, to us all; a teacher.”

Claude’s smiled returned a little, and his voice grew a little stronger.

“My grandfather was a good man and a strong leader, but no one exemplified more than him the importance of leaving a place better than he found it. He taught me the skills of a great leader by example, by leading you all benevolently and fairly, and I’ll be grateful for his guidance for the rest of my life. Hopefully you all will be too, though you’re probably wondering why he didn’t bother teaching me how to make shorter speeches…”

This drew a larger laugh from the crowd, but a swift glance at his father told Lorenz all he needed to know about his thoughts on the matter.

“These are trying times,” Claude continued. “Our country is facing threats the likes of which it hasn’t seen since its founding. I know my grandfather didn’t want to leave us all behind in the midst of war, but it’s all we can do now to take what he’s taught us—about honour and respect—and make him proud with how we choose to move forward.

“For tonight, though, we drink! We eat! We remember the man who led us for forty years,” he raised his champagne flute. “To Oswald von Riegan, a teacher, a duke, a father, and a friend. May the Goddess keep his memory.”

The room became a flurry of raised glasses and shouted toasts, and the gathered nobles all drank in unison. Even Lorenz’s father, who was enough beholden to tradition to at least honour the dead man.

The doors in all four corners of the room flew open, and servants, laden down with plates of fresh-cooked food, began to drift into the dining hall accompanied by the excited murmurs of the gathered guests.

Lorenz continued to stare at Claude rather than turn to watch the food come out, and it was because of this that he noticed the odd twitch in Claude’s facial expression as he lowered his drink from his lips. A pinching of the eyebrows, almost contemplative or confused, flitted across his features.

Even odder, he made eye contact with Lorenz. Just for a moment, but it was scrutinizing and cold, and it made Lorenz uncomfortable.

Strange.

Dinner was excellent, but Lorenz failed to find much taste in it. This was mostly due to his father, who spent the entire meal either gossiping with Edgar, bothering Ordelia and Burgundy, or staring down the duke from afar.

Lorenz was picking at a piece of roast potato when his father spoke up.

“Where’s he gone?” Count Gloucester mumbled.

Lorenz followed his father’s eye in a quick circuit around the room and was surprised indeed to see that Claude was nowhere to be seen.

He didn’t see Claude, but he _did_ see Hilda, which was almost more shocking. Shocking because she was a mere ten feet away from them, sashaying up in her pretty black ballgown like she had no cares in the world.

“My lords—milady—how are you all tonight?” She greeted, oozing charm as she drifted over to stand behind Lorenz.

Count Gloucester just narrowed his eyes at her, but Lord Edgar, who had been in some kind of conversation with Count Ordelia, seemed to brighten.

“Lady Goneril!” he said with a smile. “It is very good to see you. Is this about our business with your brother?”

“Oh, no, I’m afraid,” Hilda said sweetly, flicking her long pink hair over one shoulder. “I’m actually here for Lorenz.”

“Me?” Lorenz stared up at her. Hilda winked, and Lorenz narrowed his eyes in an action he realised too late was an eerie echo of his father.

Hilda, unfazed, chirpped away. “Yep! I need to borrow you for a minute.”

“For what reason?” Lorenz pursed his lips.

Hilda put a finger to her own. “It’s a secret!”

“Hilda, this is _hardly_ appropriate…”

“Goddess above, Lorenz,” Hilda rolled her eyes. “Are you really denying a fair woman in need?”

Lorenz’s mouth snapped shut and his father sighed.

“Go with her, boy.”

“But—”

“Go. I’m not having an incident.”

Lorenz nodded and got to his feet, letting Hilda tug him through the milling crowd into the empty foyer beyond.

“What’s this about?” he asked when they got outside, stopping in his tracks and forcing her to as well. “Is this about Claude being gone?”

“Yup,” she said quietly, popping the P. “He came up to me a little while ago. He said to meet him in the courtyard, but I dunno… I’m worried.”

“Why bring me?”

“I can’t shoot fireballs out of my hands,” Hilda said, like it was an obvious answer.

“I fail to see any situation that could arise that would necessitate me shooting fire out my hands.”

“You never know,” Hilda remarked mysteriously. “Anyway, let’s split up. I’ll go around to the east entrance and you head straight to the middle. We can meet back here if we don’t find him.”

They both nodded and broke, and suddenly Lorenz was alone in the Riegan estate courtyard, picking his way through rows of exotic plants looking for Claude.

Goddess, it all felt quite stupid. He was getting his pants dirty, all to please Hilda. She was clearly just trying to get him do her work for him. Claude hadn’t asked for him to come, just Hilda—it would be awkward trying to explain that once they caught up with him. Judging by the look Claude had given him at dinner, Lorenz wasn’t entirely sure his presence would be appreciated.

 _At least this garden is nice,_ Lorenz thought, _I haven’t seen a gazebo garden since—_

And then he tripped over a body.

Lorenz landed on his knees, feeling an uncomfortable shock in his joints as he hit the ground. He turned to see what had tripped him, and his breath caught in his throat.

Claude von Riegan lay slumped in the grass against a little white gazebo, his dark clothes camouflaging him amongst the already dark greenery. He was sitting with his back to the gazebo, legs twisted awkwardly in front of him in a position that suggested they had suddenly given out from under him.

Lorenz scrambled forward. “Claude?!”

Claude didn’t immediately stir, which sent Lorenz’s already panicking brain into a spiral. He clutched the other man’s shoulders, nails digging into the flimsy fabric of his dress shirt hard enough to bruise the skin underneath.

He shook him roughly, a year’s worth of their professor’s first aid knowledge thrown out the window.

“Claude!” He snapped. “This isn’t funny! Look at me right now!”

He was _this_ close to slapping him before he moved on his own, head lifting up from his chest as two glazed green eyes struggled to meet Lorenz’s.

As their eyes locked, Lorenz felt his guts twist.

He had seen many expressions on Claude’s face before—smug amusement, mostly, but the occasional bout of anger and displeasure—but he had never, in all his time knowing the man, seen him look properly scared.

Until now.

The eyes the young duke affixed Lorenz with were ill and foggy, but they still shimmered with unmistakable fear. From his place on the ground Claude tried to lean away, drawing his shoulders up as high as he could, keeping his terrified stare on Lorenz the entire time.

 _He thinks I’m going to hurt him,_ Lorenz realised.

 _Do you blame him?_ said the little voice in the back of his mind.

He looked _awful_. His skin was slick with sweat and tinged by a sickly paleness that hollowed every inch of him. His eyes were bleary and unfocused, no longer their usual sharp selves. Lorenz realised with a jolt the source of that acrid smell in the air—blood, dripping from his lips in a thin trickle.

“What happened?” Lorenz inquired, trying to keep his voice steady.

One of Claude’s hands moved from where he had been holding them in his lap, drawing Lorenz’s attention and revealing what he’d been clutching between his knees. A champagne flute, half-empty and shimmering in the low light. Claude clutched it closer, as if trying to keep it away.

Blood began to drip from his nose.

“You were poisoned,” Lorenz breathed, pieces falling into place. “By whom?”

Claude’s eyes widened in confusion. Lorenz huffed, feeling himself getting impatient.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Claude,” he said. “Now tell me who did this.”

Claude shook his head, wincing. “Doesn’t matter. We gotta… we gotta fix this.”

“You need a healer.”

Without warning Claude’s free hand shot up, gripping Lorenz’s wrist with surprising force. “You can’t tell anyone.”

“You’re worried about appearances?!”

“Of course I am!” He grunted, trying to sit up further, but only succeeded in doubling himself over again, groaning in pain. When he recovered, he met Lorenz’s eyes, the whites bloodshot and teary.

“If I die… I die,” he wheezed. “If I fall ill, the Alliance sees their new duke as a we–weak little boy. The only scenario where this doesn’t send _everything_ I’ve kept alive straight into the gutter is–is if we sort this out ourselves.”

Lorenz shook his head. “Claude, I can’t—”

“I have… antitoxin in my room…” he wheezed. “Get me there.”

“But—What about the party?”

“Someone at the party did this to me,” Claude said with a groan. “Don’t you get it?”

Lorenz could feel his heart hammering in his throat, every instinct telling him he needed to scream for a healer now. Everyone was still at the dinner. They would probably hear him if he shouted loud enough.

And then he remembered the fool who’d dragged him out here in the first place.

“Hilda!?” he called, looking out over the gardens. “Hilda! Get over h—”

“Don’t shout!”

Lorenz whirled on Claude, spluttering weakly. “But I have to find her! I can’t carry you!” he protested.

“Then go find her!” Claude hissed, blood flecking from his teeth. “I’m sure as hell not going anywhere!”

Lorenz hesitated for just a moment before he was on his feet once more, hands balled in two white-knuckled fists as he sprinted through the gardens.

He knew the direction Hilda had gone and, though he hadn’t seen her in over a year, Lorenz was confident in his knowledge of the woman to be able to estimate how far she would have travelled.

He found her by the east entrance, and almost tripped over a low row of peonies as he ran to her side.

“Hilda! I need you to come with me!”

“Lorenz?” she whirled around, panicked. “What’s wrong? Where’s Claude?”

“He’s hurt! Poisoned,” he panted. “We have to hurry.”

Hilda, already pale, went as white as a sheet as they rounded the gazebo and saw Claude lying in the grass, breathing like a dying man. Hilda wasted no time. She knelt down and pulled Claude into her arms, hoisting him up to her chest.

“H-Hil—”

“Quiet,” she snapped, tears already playing on the edge of her voice. She got to her feet and heaved Claude up. Blood smeared across the fine fabric of her bodice, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Claude’s head lolled against her shoulder. “H-Hilda, I—”

“Shh!” Hilda said sharply, turning to Lorenz. “Lorenz, where are we going?”

“H-his room,” Lorenz stammered, finding his voice. “He said he has antitoxin there.”

Hilda didn’t wait for any further explanation. She took off silently, Lorenz snatching the champagne flute off the ground and stumbling at her heels. The three of them tore into the eastern wing, which was as empty and still as a church, and Hilda checked the corridor both ways before dashing up the stairs.

Hilda, obviously knowing where to go, shouldered open the door to the duke’s chambers. The place was dim save for the windows, which still had their curtains thrown open to bathe the entire sitting room in eerie moonlight.

With Claude still gathered up in her arms, Hilda kicked open the bedroom door. Lorenz followed her inside in time to see her dump Claude’s trembling body as gently as possible onto the bed.

Lorenz set the champagne flute on the dresser and dashed to the bedside.

Hilda crouched low, catching Claude’s cheek in her hand and turning his face to hers.

“What do you need?” she asked him. “Where’s the antitoxin?”

Claude grunted and lifted a shaking hand, pointing to the chest of drawers across from the bed. Hilda got to her feet and dashed over.

“Bottom left,” Claude gasped, sucking in a useless, stuttering lungful of air. Lorenz didn’t need to be a healer to be able to tell he was getting closer and closer to choking on his own blood every second they wasted.

Hilda unceremoniously tore the drawer in question straight out of its slot in the wooden furniture piece, then dropped the entire thing on the bed next to Claude.

Lorenz hadn’t known what he had been expecting—not anything so obiovus as a box labelled “USE IN CASE OF ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT”, he wasn’t that stupid—but he certainly hadn’t expected to see at least forty vials of antitoxin of varying size, hand-labelled, jostling around unprotected in the bottom of the drawer.

“Shit,” he and Hilda said simultaneously.

“Hilda,” Claude gasped suddenly. He was deteriorating quickly, Lorenz realised, and the effort it took for him to say even a few words past the blood in his mouth was palpable. “Y—You need to fi—find Judith.”

“Judith? Why?”

“Pl—ease…” he choked, eyes pleading. “Just d—do it.”

He coughed, sending a smatter of blood across the rich quilted bedcover.

Hilda bit her lip, dancing back on her toes in a stressed motion. Lorenz just stood and watched the cogs turn in her head, the weights and measures of this awful situation realigning themselves.

“Find out which one is the antidote,” Hilda said finally. “I’m going to go find Judith.”

“W-Why?”

“Because I trust him,” she said. Her eyes were cold. “You should to.”

And then she was gone.

Lorenz looked down at the drawer of vials. Each one had a different label, but the contents all looked more or less the same. That left him at square one, and he was running out of what precious time Claude had left.

He sat down on the bed next to Claude, trying his best to ignore the tremors of the young duke next to him.

“Which one, Claude?”

Claude coughed again, but didn’t answer.

“Claude!” Lorenz reached out and grabbed the other man’s shoulder, rolling him over so they were facing each other. “You need to tell me.”

He pushed the open drawer towards Claude’s face, and while the other man’s eyes began to slowly cast over the vials, he didn’t speak.

“Please!”

Lorenz was not a shouter, not usually, but panic was broiling deep within his chest and he was getting desperate.

And maybe the Goddess was looking down on them, because Claude suddenly reached out with a shaking hand.

“It has writing on it… sh—should look li—like—”

He rested one of his trembling fingers on the back of Lorenz’s hand and began to draw. Over seconds that stretched to an eternity, Claude drew and re-drew a single, sweeping symbol.

“Okay,” Lorenz urged softly. “Keep drawing.”

Feeling the stuttering path of the curling symbol on his hand, Lorenz sorted quickly through the vials. He wasn’t sure exactly of the origin of the characters on each vial, but there had to have been at least three different foreign scripts spread among them. _Really,_ he thought in frazzled huff, _did Claude have to make everything so difficult?_

He eventually settled on one he thought matched the symbol Claude had drawn. A single, curling shape in black ink, with a hearty helping of thin, silvery liquid swirling behind the glass.

It was then, in a moment of misplaced triumph, that Lorenz realised Claude was no longer moving.

He looked down and felt his stomach drop as he caught sight Claude lying still and pale beside him. He would have looked like he was sleeping, if not for the blood smeared down his lips and chin.

“C-Claude?”

If Lorenz hadn’t been alone, he would have been embarrassed at how small his voice was.

He reached out and shook Claude by the shoulder. “Claude? Please…?”

He didn’t answer.

Lorenz’s hands itched and flared with useless white magic, the ebbing healing energy finding no purchase in the poison that coursed through Claude’s veins.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

He had no idea what to do.

 _Oh,_ said the voice in his head, _how truly proud your father will be now._

The door flew open to reveal Judith von Daphnel, like a vision of righteous fury, and Hilda trailing behind her like a scared puppy. Judith’s eyes turned steely when she saw Claude, lying still as a corpse on the bed. She barely spared Lorenz a glance as she strode forward.

“Out,” she demanded, wresting the vial out of Lorenz’s fingers and giving it a cursory glance. Seemingly approving of whatever the selection was, she propped Claude up against the headboard and tilted the contents into his mouth.

Lorenz didn’t move. He just watched in mounting horror as Claude stirred only to choke on the liquid. Judith, apparently expecting this, clamped her hand over his mouth, keeping it closed.

“Drink it, you stupid child,” she muttered and turned her burning gaze to Lorenz. “I said _out_ , boy.”

“B-but—”

Claude let out a muffled whine and Judith removed her hand, guiding him none too gently onto his side on the bed. Lorenz saw his face twist into a grimace, but none of the antidote was visible; he’d managed to swallow it.

The relief he felt was colossal, but not enough to stop the hammering of his heart. Lorenz watched Claude’s chest heave and saw his eyes, slivers of muted green, clear for just an instant before falling closed.

_“Out.”_

Judith was on her feet before either Lorenz or Hilda could say anything, shepherding the two young nobles out the door and into the sitting room.

“Wait here,” Judith said dryly, and then the door was slammed in their faces.

Lorenz could have left then. But he didn’t.

An hour later, he was sitting hesitant vigil outside Claude’s room and thinking about circumstance.

He was supposed to be in the Gloucester manor on the waterfront right now. He was supposed to be planning his remarks for the inaugural roundtable. He was _supposed_ to be relaxing.

His father was going to kill him.

Because circumstance had brought him here instead. Circumstance had found him trailing Hilda out of the dining hall like a lost duckling looking for the man who had made his life a veritable mess for almost three years.

Circumstance had him—the heir of Gloucester—out looking for the newly minted Duke Riegan among the rose bushes like he was a common squire. It was that mere circumstance through which he had found Claude again, half-dead in the garden.

Circumstance had found him following Hilda through the darkened halls of the estate, rushing to Claude’s room without being seen.

Lorenz had been unable to do anything more than watch on, seeing the lines of pain jolting through the young duke’s frame as he lay curled in Hilda’s arms, bleeding steadily from his mouth and nose like something inside him had broken.

Poison.

Assassination.

_Treason._

The words tumbled through Lorenz’s head.

As much as he was annoyed by Claude, by his flippancy and inappropriately laid-back attitude, even now in a time of war, Lorenz did not wish death on the man.

As much as some part of him, deep down, would be happily poised to shoulder the burden of leading the Alliance. As much as some part of him craved that responsibility, he wouldn’t wish such a torture as this on his worst enemy.

And Claude was most certainly not his enemy.

They weren’t good friends, not even close. A year of bickering had imposed a distance between them that meant they likely never would be, by Lorenz’s estimate.

But Claude was not his enemy… so why had he looked so _frightened?_

It had been so jarring, to see any fear in that shimmering green gaze, let alone have it directed at him.

_But do you blame him? After all the things your father says to him, after all the things he’s done?_

The ordeal in the room had been more than a little jarring, too. There were times, especially during their stay at school, that Lorenz felt he was the only one in the world who found Claude’s behaviour suspicious, who cared about his obvious strangeness and odd habits.

The image of the last Riegan, clinging to life next to a collection of pre-prepared antidotes was one that would not soon leave Lorenz. Not for some time at least.

“Hey, Lorenz?”

Lorenz glanced at Hilda, who was sitting in a chair just a few feet from him.

The two of them had been sitting outside Claude’s room for the last hour, like nervous little gargoyles guarding the portcullis of a castle, while Judith attended to him. Hilda had managed to wrangle blankets and a promise of privacy from Caius, the estate steward, which had led to a so-called “sleepover set-up” he was finding incredibly undignified.

“Yes, Hilda?” he sighed.

“Do you think that’s Claude’s mom?”

Hilda nodded to the large oil painting hanging across from them, indicating the subject of her yet-unanswered question.

It depicted four figures. The late Duke Riegan and a woman Lorenz could only assume was his wife sat front and centre, flanked by a young man and woman with their hands on the shoulders of the elder two and their emerald eyes staring daggers at the viewer. They both looked to be about twenty.

The four were marked as family by varying shades of auburn hair and a milky skin tone. Such traits were glaringly vacant in the new duke, but the strong line of the young man’s jaw…? Perhaps Lorenz’s mother had been right in saying Claude looked like his uncle.

And the young woman’s eyes… _those_ in particular were eerily familiar… vibrant green and oh-so conniving. Lorenz would have to commend the painter for capturing the clever glint in them, identical to the one he shared a classroom with for a year.

“I think so,” he said. Hilda just nodded solemnly, and when she spoke her voice was wet with tears.

“I don’t know where she is. I asked him back at school, you know? He wouldn’t tell me. H-how are we going to let her know… if…”

_If he doesn’t make it._

“We’d find a way,” he said matter-of-factly, realising too late it was probably the wrong thing to say. Tears welled in Hilda’s eyes, and he hastily tried to right the ship.

“But it won’t come to that,” he added swiftly, not knowing if he believed it.

Hilda looked as if she was about to say something, when they were interrupted by the sound of a door creaking open.

They were on their feet instantly.

“You two,” Judith stared at them with hawkish eyes as she gently eased herself out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind her. It was eerily quiet. “I’ve done all I can, but I probably can’t give you a definitive read on his condition.”

“W-what do you mean?” Hilda said, sounding every inch the scared young girl she was probably trying not to sound like. “Is he dying?”

Judith shook her head. “He’s tough, and your quick thinking definitely helped—but whoever did this used a lot of toxin. It’s entirely possible the damage has already been done.”

Tears began to spill down Hilda’s cheeks, so it was down to Lorenz to keep the exchange going.

“Is there anything more we can do?”

“When I actually managed to get a word out of him, he was pretty insistent no one outside his inner circle be informed of tonight’s events. I suppose that includes you two now, so I just ask that you don’t go spreading this around.”

Lorenz nodded and Hilda spoke up.

“Can we stay with him?”

Judith’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, and Lorenz thought his must have be doing much the same.

The notion was nowhere _near_ appropriate. Not only was he expected by his father and Hilda a mere guest, staying in the bedchambers of the sovereign duke himself like common children at a slumber party was… unheard of.

He cleared his throat “It’s not–”

“Not _what_ , Lorenz? Not proper?!” Hilda whirled on him, eyes red and bloodshot. “Newsflash, asshole! None of this is _proper_! Claude’s _dying_!”

Moonlight caught the silvery tracks of tears on Hilda’s face. They looked like little rivers, shimmering and swift. There was something poetic about it – and something achingly sad.

Lorenz rarely ever saw Hilda cry. Not for real.

“Hilda, I–”

“He’s not _dying_ , girl,” Judith interrupted, gaze flitting between the two young nobles with an appraising air. “And if you’d like to go in, I can’t stop you, I’d just recommend keeping the volume down. If we’re fortunate, Claude should be on his feet for the funeral, but he needs his rest.”

Lorenz had the decency to look embarrassed, even if the Daphnel woman’s manner of address was a bit casual for his tastes.

Hilda was already through the door though, leaving Lorenz to awkwardly thank Judith on his own before following her.

When Lorenz finally detached himself from Judith and entered, Hilda was standing on the far side of Claude’s bed, wringing her hands together like she didn’t know what to do with them otherwise. She was the very definition of _hovering_ , a term Lorenz would usually reserve for overprotective mothers by their children’s bedsides, and it was an odd look for her.

He approached slowly.

It was odd, for the place to be so still after the calamitous panic it had been in before. But the situation’s eerie nature didn’t stop it from being calm.

There was no more blood, but Claude still looked like death warmed over. He was shivering ever so slightly, and a sickly, patchy paleness across his face turned his dark complexion into a veritable battleground of wrong-ness. His dark hair hung lank in his face, and the lines of his body were limp with fatigue.

Judith had apparently taken steps to clean him up, washing his face and hair of blood and sweat, but he was still in the same clothes he’d been wearing at the dinner. Embroidered silks and brocades stained with their wearer’s blood.

 _At least if he dies, he’s already dressed for the occasion,_ Lorenz thought, before feeling appropriately awful and averting his gaze.

Judging by the state of his room, Claude was apparently still halfway through moving into his new chambers, but it was already just as chaotic as his room had been back in Garreg Mach.

As Hilda scooted a chair closer to Claude’s bedside, Lorenz looked around.

Most of the furniture that was in place was likely still Oswald’s, save for the chest drawer full of antidotes Hilda had ripped from its place. Claude’s touches to the room seemed to be hesitant, borne from necessity rather than a desire to make the space his own; a coat rack in the far corner, a few candles for reading light here and there, and a drawer full of antitoxin.

(Lorenz wouldn’t be getting over that any time soon.)

The desk in front of the window caught Lorenz’s eye. There was a letter lying open on it, half-written by the looks of it, sitting among a mess of blank parchment and burned-down candles. Whatever Claude was writing, it was taking him a while.

Lorenz, driven by an antsy curiosity, crept over and eased the folds of the parchment apart.

_Dear Mother,_

_I know it’s been some time since I’ve written_ —

Lorenz almost choked, letting the parchment fall closed once more as he took a step backwards. That was very much _not_ for him to read.

Not at all for him to read…

But…

When it came to Claude, he’d always had a bit more curiosity than sense.

Sparing a glance over his shoulder, Lorenz quietly re-assumed his stance near the desk and delicately opened the letter.

_Dear Mother,_

_I know it’s been some time since I’ve written, and I’m sorry, but with our usual routes out of commission I have to be a bit smarter. I’m sure you’re tired of only getting letters from me when shit hits the fan. I promise one day I’ll send you a letter about something boring, like birdwatching or cute girls or the weather, but for now there have been some events you need to be informed of._

_Grandfather has passed away_ —

The letter abruptly cut off and Lorenz let the parchment fall closed again, feeling the hot tenterhooks of guilt dig deep into his chest.

It hadn’t even _occurred_ to him that the duke’s daughter might not have known about her father’s death. She certainly wasn’t _here_ —she hadn’t been seen by Alliance nobility in over two decades, by his father’s count. This letter was all but confirmation that Tiana was no longer in the country… she probably wasn’t even in Fódlan _at_ _all_ if a letter from her son was her only way of getting this information.

Two years ago, this would have had Lorenz running straight back to his father, potential blackmail in hand. But would he do it now? After a year of begrudgingly getting to know the Riegan heir? After another year of feeling his absence in his day-to-day life like a strange, uncomfortable shadow?

“You’d better not be snooping around, Lorenz.”

Lorenz turned to see Hilda looking at him, tear-filled eyes glimmering in the candlelight.

“Never, my dear Hilda.”

This brought a small smile to her lips and Lorenz felt somewhat successful. He made his way back to the bedside, drawing a chair up so he could sit close to his companions.

“You shouldn’t look through his things. He trusts you”

Lorenz wasn’t sure that was true, remembering the way Claude had looked at him in the courtyard. If it was true, he was even less sure he deserved it.

“Please,” he said. “If Claude didn’t wish for these things to be seen they would be hidden where no man could ever find them.”

“Mm,” Hilda hummed. “Maybe. He’s sneaky like that, isn’t he?”

Claude shifted a little, which made the two of them fall silent in one sharp motion. He didn’t stir, but his posture had become more tense, his eyes scrunched with pain.

Hearing Hilda’s little gasp beside him, Lorenz reached out, letting Faith gather in his palm.

The balming white light sunk into Claude’s body and, this time, Lorenz felt it take root. He felt the exact locations of the abrasions that seemed to litter Claude’s internals, and inwardly winced as only a few of them managed to close under his magic’s urging.

“I didn’t know you could heal,” Hilda mumbled.

“I stared studying after… after last year.”

Claude’s breathing evened out, just a little, and it was only then that Lorenz let go of the sigh he had been holding in. No colour miraculously came back to his face—no paleness receded—but it was enough for now to simply see the tension in his limbs fade, to see his face relax just a fraction.

“You can leave if you want to Lorenz,” Hilda offered. “I bet it looks a bit odd. Us three disappearing like this. People will talk.”

“Oh, I’m sure they will, but you love the attention and Claude won’t care. So why try to stop it?”

Hilda laughed softly.

Lorenz liked making Hilda laugh, not because she wasn’t wont to do it, but because her laughs were so often fake ones. He wasn’t an expert at reading people, but he’d gained a better feel for her moods over the years.

She and Claude were similar in that way—they were both practiced liars. He was just glad he could pull the truth from her sometimes.

“I’m glad you’re staying Lorenz,” she said. He was sure it was the truth and it made him happy.

“I couldn’t possibly leave you two here by yourselves, Hilda. I am deathly serious.” _Bad word choice,_ he thought, but he kept going. “How am I to be a protector of my people if I can’t protect even two of my peers?”

“You’re a good guy, Lorenz.”

“I do try.”

“You do, don’t you?” She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, I-I’m such a fucking mess—”

Lorenz shook his head. “We’re in private quarters, Hilda, don’t worry about crying. This is a perfectly reasonable time to do so.”

“I haven’t seen any of you… we’re… we’re all so _far apart_ now.” Hilda sniffed loudly and wiped a hand roughly across her eyes. “I don’t even know where Leonie is… or Ignatz or Raph… Marianne sends letters but Lysithea can’t and you _don’t_ … I—I _miss_ you guys.”

 _I miss you too,_ he wanted to say, but he didn’t. He just put his hand on her shoulder.

Hilda reached out, gathering Claude’s hand limply in hers, running her thumb over his knuckles in a gesture far more for her comfort than it could have possibly been for his. Lorenz said nothing.

“I don’t want to lose him,” she said quietly. “Not right after I got him back. It’s not fair. Is that too much to ask? It doesn’t feel like it should be.”

Lorenz had only lost one person in his life before now worth noting, and that had been their professor.

Lorenz remembered the harried return to the Leicester Alliance after Garreg Mach fell; the Golden Deer all packed up and rushed to the border like they themselves were luggage. Those silent three days of travel before they had all gone their separate ways had been the first time Lorenz had ever seen Claude truly angry—the first time he had ever seen Hilda properly cry.

The loss had been shattering—to have someone that indomitable, as seemingly unstoppable as she had been, taken from them in an instant.

He was feeling much the same now, which surprised him, because he hadn’t quite realised Claude had started occupying that same mythic, untouchable status as their professor had until right now. Now he wasn’t anything so grand, he was just a man. He was a man reduced to flesh and bone and wheezing, choking breaths in a throat torn asunder by treachery. He was so very small.

They all were. They were small and human and breakable, and Hilda was right. It wasn’t fair.

After a moment of tense silence, Hilda held out her free hand, the one not clutching Claude’s like a lifeline, to Lorenz. After a few seconds more, he realised what she was asking for.

He took her hand in his and they waited, linked together like scared children.

It was one of the most nerve-wracking things Lorenz had ever done and, considering where he went to school, that was saying something.

He and Hilda sat together in the dark, listening to the distant murmur of guests downstairs and the ragged sounds of Claude’s breathing. Both of them wondered if another funeral would need to be called sooner rather than later.

They sat together, waiting to see if Claude made it through the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Daily reminder that Lorenz’s dad straight up had Claude’s uncle murdered and we really don’t talk about that enough.
> 
> That sure was crazy. Claude seemed pretty confident someone at the dinner was to blame, and Lorenz is probably pretty suspicious of his father, but who do you guys think is behind it? If you have any passing knowledge of King Lear you’ll probably recognise a few of the new names in this chapter and the last on top of the existing ones, and maybe even be able to use that to figure out who may or may not be trustworthy…hmm… Who's to say?
> 
> Apologies if there are some rough patches in this chapter, as I'm posting it at 1 in the morning. (I have class tomorrow and wanted to get it done before then) I'll probably pop in an clean it up later before posting the next chapter. 
> 
> Drop a sub and stay frosty!


	3. Claude I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I which things finally start looking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> these poor chapters keep getting longer. i'm an unpaceable beast.
> 
> [vibe check 3: tokyo drift](https://open.spotify.com/track/4bl38xLIkTB6VO5r2EBvb1?si=l3ICnFg0Q5ebH8Rt8ZT4Wg)

Claude awakened to soft morning light cutting irritating line of sunlight across his eyes, drawing him reluctantly from a fitful unconsciousness.

It took him several long moments to orient himself. He wasn’t in his room? Oh. Right. Gramps was dead. This was his old room. Claude lived here now.

But how had he gotten here? It was morning, but the last thing he remembered was the welcome dinner, standing in front of a room of people he barely knew—what had happened next—he’d made his toast and then—

He suddenly became acutely aware of the taste of blood in his mouth.

Oh, fuck. He remembered now.

Claude cracked his eyes open, staring blearily down at the rumpled sheets of his grandfather’s old bed—belonging to him now—stained with blood and soft light in equal measure.

He had been poisoned. Shit.

It was disappointing, but an assassination attempt was bound to have happened at some point. He was only pissed off that it had to happen _now_.

He’d known the second he’d taken a drink, but it had been a second too late to stop himself from swallowing. His mouth had been filled with a cloying sweetness that had made his heart plummet when he recognised it.

Hrym Needleflower, found only in the northern Empire territories.

It was a unique little plant, aptly named as it had the interesting side effect of, when ingested, entering the bloodstream and weakening the lining of internal tissue to open bleeding wounds in the victim’s organs.

It was slow to act, but quick to kill, as most who consumed it died from internal bleeding long before the poison shut down the brain.

It also tasted like sugar cane, which wasn’t so much important as it was morbidly interesting. Claude was lucky he’d managed to work with a diluted sample of it back at the academy, or he probably wouldn’t have recognised the taste or had an antitoxin prepared.

At least now he knew why every inch of his body was aching like he’d been crushed by a wyvern.

“Fuck,” he said softly, and regretted it immediately. Whatever injuries had been lying idle in his throat suddenly flared up under the motion of speaking, setting his whole brain momentarily on fire.

He bit his cheek to stop himself from grunting, knowing the sound would just inflame the pain further.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

It had been a long time since Claude had been poisoned by anyone other than himself—and those moments shouldn’t even really be counted anyway, because accidentally dosing yourself with mild stomach poison wasn’t the same as someone trying to kill a seven year old at a state dinner.

The last time he had been properly poisoned he had been fifteen. Though attempts on his life had waned as he’d grown older, that hadn’t stopped them completely. He’d been visiting his aunt on the southern coast at the time and while she hadn’t been the one to organise the poisoning (probably), she hadn’t been entirely sympathetic either. She’d made time to stop by his sickbed to tell him he should’ve known better than to take food from strangers.

That had been a mere month before the news of his uncle’s death had found its way to the winding streets and noble parlours of Almyra’s capital. _Leicester is in turmoil,_ the people had whispered in triumphant voices, _their leading house is on the brink of ruin._

Claude hadn’t been able to leave fast enough.

And now he was here, poisoned again. Things really were no different here than they had been at home.

Well, maybe a _little_ different.

Claude became slowly aware of someone holding his hand. He looked down to see their slender, pale fingers tangled up in his dark ones.

For just an instant he thought of his mother—but that wasn’t right. His mother was hundreds and hundreds of miles away, after all, and she would never be caught dead painting her nails that particular shade of pink.

His eyes trailed up the figure and shortly rested on the sleeping form of Hilda. She was half-sitting in an armchair shoved right up against his bedside, and half-lying on the bed itself, her head resting on the sheets next to Claude’s pillow with her bright hair fanned out around her.

She was still wearing the clothes she had been wearing last night, lying close to him as easily as breathing.

Claude flexed his fingers, still locked in hers.

“Hilda?” he breathed, trying to keep his voice from aggravating his throat, only succeeding in making it almost imperceptibly quiet. She didn’t wake up, but someone else did.

Claude blinked away the rest of the haze in his vision as he struggled to bring the rest of the room into focus. There was another armchair pushed close to his bed, and this one was occupied with another figure he hadn’t noticed. He was asleep sitting up, face propped on one hand and purple locks falling out of the pins they’d been held back with the night before.

It was _Lorenz_.

Lorenz roused, perhaps at the sound of Claude’s voice—a light sleeper, he had been as long as Claude had known him—and blinked slowly in the light.

“Lorenz?” Claude wheezed, causing the other man to jump. Purple eyes widened in shock.

“C-Claude,” he stammered. 

Claude smiled. “Good morning,” he rasped. Ouch.

Lorenz’s concerned expression grew even softer, which made Claude take pause. He’d never been on the receiving of end of any sympathy from Lorenz before, and he was quickly realising it was a weird place to be. The Lorenz he knew from school would’ve _never_ looked at him like that—would’ve never apparently spent a night at his bedside.

Would have never helped him like he had…

It almost made him feel bad for having suspected him.

“How are you feeling?” Lorenz asked quietly. Claude tried to give him a smile, but knew it just looked pained from the way Lorenz’s eyebrows pinched.

“Not the best,” is all he replied.

Lorenz sighed quietly. “Well I… I’m relieved to see you awake, regardless.”

“Ever the gentleman, Lorenz,” Claude whispers slyly. “I’m—”

He broke off into a fit of awful, wet coughs. Pain flared in his chest at the motion, reigniting the raw lining of his throat.

The hot spears of pain drove deep into his core, once again sending his brain into a blind spiral. He was only vaguely aware of his own body, which curled up and out of Hilda’s grasp. Knees were brought up to his chest and his hands to his throat, digging into the skin as if he could tear the burning feeling out

Suddenly, a cool feeling. It slipped over his skin like cold, quenching spring water—down his throat and into his lungs like a balm. He sucked in a quiet breath and found the pain within decreasing rapidly. He took another breath; his hammering heart began to steady.

He blinked, lowering his trembling hands from his throat to see Lorenz, on his feet, a glowing hand on Claude’s shoulder and a worried expression on his face.

Odd, Claude didn’t know Lorenz could do Faith magic.

“Are you okay?” Lorenz whispered. Claude nodded.

Lorenz closed his eyes and sighed, as if a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. “Good. That was quite a scare.” He slumped down in his seat.

“Lorenz?” Hilda’s tired voice cut in, and Claude felt the weight of her head on the mattress lift. “What’s goin—Claude?!”

She was sitting up, eyes wide in Claude’s direction. She looked a mess, with day-old eye makeup tear-streaked down her cheeks and her hair tangled and plastered to the left side of her face.

But then she smiled at him, wide and unbelieving and real, and Claude had never in his life been happier to see her.

“Hey, Hils,” he croaked, cracking a wry smile. “What the verdict? Dramatic enough for you?”

She threw herself forward onto him, wordlessly pulling him up and wrapping him in those strong arms of hers. Claude’s chest let out a dull ache of protest, but he ignored it. He brought his arms up, looping them around her back. His embrace wasn’t nearly as strong as hers, but it didn’t matter. 

“Careful, Hilda!” Lorenz chided. “I’ve healed what I can but he’s still unwell.”

“I don’t care,” Hilda protested, voice simultaneously strained and soft. Her next words were hushed, meant only for Claude. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

She pulled back slightly, so she was looking Claude in the eyes. He looked deep into them, at the unshed tears and vibrant relief brimming in the shade cast by her curtain of hair and, not for the first time, he thought about irony.

How ironic was it that his first real friend in this country had been a Goneril? That the first person he had opened up to had been her? That she was the first person he turned to for anything?

How ironic was it that the hands that held him now, so tenderly and gently, carried beneath their skin the blood of the family that had acted as stalwart killers of his people for generations?

How ironic was it that he didn’t really care about that at all?

“Don’t ever do that to me again, Claude,” she said, so stricken and sure. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”

It was too much. Lorenz’s quiet, genuine sympathy and Hilda’s too-loud, scathingly bright concern. It was all too much.

Things were _so much different_ here than they’d been back home.

Claude held Hilda tighter, burying his face in her shoulder. He ignored how her hair made his nose itch, and instead focused on how warm she was… at how tightly she held him back.

“Aww,” Hilda said, and her ensuing laughter was light and rhythmic. “Don’t cry, Claude! That’s my job!”

“M’not crying,” he mumbled.

“Sure,” said Lorenz, eyeroll audible. “You’re not crying and I’m Saint Cethleann.”

“Shuddup, Lorenz.”

Hilda ran off several minutes later, promising to return with breakfast.

“Imagine that,” Claude said, watching the door swing shut behind her. “All it took for Hilda to do something for me without complaining was getting poisoned.”

Lorenz snorted. “Maybe you should do it more often.”

“You’re funny, Lorenz, anyone ever tell you that?” Claude teased. Lorenz looked to him with a raised eyebrow.

“Not if I can help it.”

Claude grinned, ignoring how much it hurt. “Hysterical.”

The two boys spent the next few minutes getting Claude into clean clothes, which mostly consisted of Lorenz—ever the modest nobleman—handing Claude fresh clothes with his back turned, only forgoing “giving him privacy” to complain about how he was lacing everything wrong and eventually doing it for him.

(“I’m pretty sure you’ve seen me without a shirt on before, Lorenz.” “I know, but if you won’t let me hold onto even a shred of propriety in your presence, I will be no better than Hilda.” “Fair enough.”)

Lorenz was even pickier than Hilda when it came to being his stylist. Claude knew he wouldn’t be asking either of them to help if he had any real choice in the matter. Not that he _had_ asked.

“And what is _this?”_

Claude sighed and scooted off the bed, getting to his feet with a shaky grunt. Using the armchairs and bedposts to steady himself, he shuffled over to where Lorenz was sitting on the floor and tearing clothes out of his drawers.

“You’re making a mess,” he said, not really caring but trying to get a rise out of the other man anyway. Lorenz didn’t bite.

“This place is already a mess.” He held up a dark green dress shirt. “What is this? It’s much too big for you.”

Claude sat down cross-legged next to Lorenz and peered at the garment closely. “Uh, yeah. That’s because it belonged to Godfrey.”

Lorenz made an odd expression. “You… you wear your uncle’s clothes?”

There was something strange in the way he said it that Claude couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t entirely condescending, which was more than he could usually say about Lorenz. “Sometimes,” he admitted. “It’s not like he’s using them.”

That seemed to hit a nerve. Lorenz’s expression pinched—one may have even said it crumpled a little—which set a silent alarm off in Claude’s head. Usually he was pretty in tune to when and where he was making people upset. This wasn’t one of those times. What exactly was it about his words that were bothering the other man so much?

“Lorenz?” he ventured. “Are you—”

“My mother—” Lorenz cleared his throat and looked away “—my mother remarked that you looked quite a bit like him. Last night.”

Claude looked down at himself. The shirt Lorenz had settled on for him was white cotton, with embroidery of antlers running up the lapels and cuffs. It had been Godfrey’s too, but he suddenly didn’t have a huge desire to tell Lorenz that.

“Mm,” he said instead. “Holst said that to me, too.”

Lorenz still wasn’t looking at him.

“Do you…” he sighed, oddly shaky. Claude had no idea where this as going. “Did you ever meet him?”

Okay, _that_ was entirely out of nowhere. Claude considered the question carefully, running its answer through what details of his life he’d already told Lorenz.

“No. I wish I could have, honestly, but my mother didn’t really like talking about her family—still doesn’t, really.”

Lorenz looked conflicted. He dragged his eyes back to Claude, looking guilty as sin. Claude quirked an eyebrow, but Lorenz didn’t stop.

“Does… Does she know?”

Where _was_ this going?

“About what?” Claude asked hesitantly.

“Your grandfather.”

Shit.

Okay, so either Lorenz was _way_ more attentive than Claude had given him credit for, and had been piecing together any and all scraps of information about Tiana he’d let slip over the years to form an accurate picture of her circumstances— _or_ , he’d just read the letter Claude was pretty sure was still on his desk.

“Did you read my letter?”

Lorenz went bright red, his fingers tightening nervously in the shirt. “N-no!”

Okay, so he _definitely_ had. Lorenz was a terrible liar. Always had been.

“Really?” Claude said dryly.

Lorenz was beet red at this point. “Fine!” he squawked. “I read it!”

Claude sighed. “Lorenz!”

“I’m sorry!”

Gods, he was so fucking _stupid_ for not putting that away before the dinner.

 _Well you didn’t exactly expect to have people in here_ , said his brain. _Or get poisoned._

 _Shut up, brain,_ he thought.

“You know in most polite societies it’s a _crime_ to read other people’s mail,” he said, fixing Lorenz with a disappointed glare.

“I didn’t—I didn’t know it was a letter when I looked at it!”

Claude tried to mentally rewind to the day before, when he had sat down to try another pass at the letter in the morning before Hilda had arrived. He was pretty sure there wasn’t anything incriminating in it; he’d written about ten different drafts, and he hadn’t been able to get through a cursory introduction in any of them.

Plus, the expression on Lorenz’s face was sympathetic, not accusatory. It didn’t imply anything like “you signed that letter with your real name and I definitely absolutely one-hundred percent saw it”. No. It was far more… concerned. And Claude was apparently the object of that concern. So, he asked:

“Did you find out anything interesting.”

And against all the assumptions he had about Lorenz that Claude was starting to realise were false, Lorenz didn’t say anything snide or awful or nosy.

“You’re having trouble telling her,” Lorenz said softly.

Claude suddenly felt very seen. Not in an “I know who you are” way, but in something dangerously close to an “I know how you feel” way. It was weird, weirder still in the fact it wasn’t an entirely unwelcome feeling.

“I’m trying…” he said. “I’m sort of… running through all the ways I could say it in my head. It’s hard to get it all down on paper though. It’s just such a big thing to say.”

“Are you going to tell her about—” Lorenz’s mouth curls into a grimace “—last night?”

Claude scoffed. “You mean am I going to tell my mom about the vicious attack on her only son’s life?”

Lorenz winced. “Yes?”

“Hm, well, I hadn’t actually thought about that yet.” Claude bit his lip and turned to Lorenz. “How about you advise me?”

“Advise you?”

“Yeah, be my advisor. Like proper nobles, right? Aren’t I supposed to have advisors?”

“I will not.”

“Why?”

“Being your advisor implies I am your subordinate in some way. I am not, so I am not an advisor,” Lorenz said, only a little snottily. Claude was very impressed with how much he was holding back. “I will be your _consulting_ _colleague_. Because we’re _colleagues_.”

“Okay “colleague”,” Claude smiled. “You want to consult me?”

Lorenz bowed where he was sitting. “I will try my best.”

Claude blinked. He’d been expecting a little more banter. “Okay. Uh… Should I tell her?”

“That someone tried to kill you?”

“I mean… _yeah_?”

“Well,” Lorenz scratched his chin, obviously giving his answer a lot of thought. “I don’t know your mother, so I can’t tell you how she’d react to such information. How badly would it upset her? You wouldn’t want to scare her unduly…”

At first, Claude wanted to laugh. If it wouldn’t be the most incriminating thing he could possibly say, he’d gladly tell Lorenz about the regular fights his mother would have with Nader, and how often those fights would end with her winning. He wondered if he’d still accuse her of being scared if he knew she’d once thrown the most terrifying Almyran General to ever grace Fódlan’s borders off a balcony.

But on second thought… he found himself remembering the first attempt on his life he had been old enough to recall.

He had been four, and a servant in the palace had tried to slit his throat while he slept.

The man had been dragged before his father’s court, crying like a child, and Claude had been instructed to identify him. _Is that him? Is he the one?_ He’d nodded, because it had been the truth, though the man had screamed that he was lying. He’d screamed and screamed. Called him a mutt and a liar and a demon.

His mother and knelt next to him and held his face in her hands.

“Stay close to your father, Khalid,” she had said in Fódlan’s tongue, a special language they shared, her voice dangerously even. “I’ll be back soon.”

She had left with the guards after that, dragging the assassin out to the courtyard he would soon die in, while Claude had followed his mother’s instructions; clung to his father’s robes like a tethered boat and watched her until he could see her no longer.

His mother had left so she could kill the man herself.

It had apparently been a violent enough execution that it earned her a nickname among the palace guard. The Shrike, they took to calling her, after the delicate grassland birds that impaled their prey alive on branches. Beautiful butchers. _Gods help anyone who dares get between the Shrike and her child,_ the guards would say. It didn’t stop people from trying to kill him for long, but those who did had incentive to try a bit harder not to get caught.

Tiana wasn’t one to be phased by much—but as he had grown older Claude had come to consider that maybe his mother’s stoicism had been a mask for her fear as much as his laid-back attitude was for his. A by-product of the coward-hating warrior culture she’d transplanted herself in, perhaps.

“She’ll be upset if I tell her,” he admitted. “But not in the way you’re thinking. She wouldn’t cry or anything, she’d probably just be angry… scared, but… mostly angry.”

Lorenz snorted. “I’m assuming you don’t get your easy-going temperament from her, then?”

“Nah. Mom can be pretty high-strung.”

Lorenz’s expression soured. “That’s… not a very polite thing to say about your mother.”

“Well, yeah, but she’s not here.” He smiled despite himself. “I won’t tell her if you don’t.”

If Lorenz was tempted to make a snide comment, he didn’t. Instead he straightened up, regarding Claude with a very noble air.

“Well then, I believe it’s usually pertinent to be honest with one’s parents,” he said with a tone of finality. “Anger is a valid reaction, perhaps even a valuable one. And I’m quite sure a woman with your mother’s experience and lineage would be able to offer you some great insight if you were to open up to her.”

Lorenz held his hand up close to his face as he spoke—he’d always spoken with his whole body, that was just his way—and Claude found his eye drawn to the back of his hand.

It was still there. The night before, through a haze of pain and choked breaths, Claude had drawn the Almyran letter _sin_ there in his own blood, a mirror of what was written on the needleflower antitoxin vial. It was still there, the blood flaked and dry, no longer forming the proper loops of the letter. It was still there.

Lorenz, who’s attention to his own image was on par with, if not greater than, Hilda’s, hadn’t yet found cause to wash himself of the blood.

Lorenz, a perfectionist and pretentious neat freak, who fashioned himself a great and superior leader, had dirtied himself in mud and blood and sweat last night to save Claude’s life, and hadn’t even thought to clean himself up before Clause had woken up.

_Oh. How wrong I’ve been._

It was all too much. Claude began to laugh.

“W-what?”

He kept laughing.

“Claude!”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I just… I read this whole thing terribly wrong, didn’t I?”

Lorenz pursed his lips, looking confused. “What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“I… I guess it means I’m sorry. For not trusting you.” Claude stifled his laughter and sighed. “I’ll admit, when you ran into me in the gardens, I thought you might’ve been there to finish me off.”

Lorenz’s face fell, and Claude could tell that Lorenz was already aware of what he was talking about. He must have seen how scared he was.

_And he still helped._

“But that was stupid, Lorenz.”

“Was it?”

Claude hauled himself into a kneeling position and leaned forward to put a hand on Lorenz’s shoulder. 

“There’s a difference between hating someone and wanting them dead,” Claude assured. “I was being obtuse and scared and couldn’t tell the difference.”

Lorenz sighed and looked up at the ceiling. Claude let his hand slip from his shoulder and just watched him for a moment. The action was quietly and oddly close to that of a prayer.

“Claude,” Lorenz murmured.

“Mm?” Claude hummed.

Lorenz leaned forward and sighed. He put his head in his hands and was quiet for a long moment before saying, “I… I have reason to believe my father was behind the accident that took Godfrey’s life.”

Oh.

Holy _shit_.

Holy _shit_ was this actually happening _right now?_

“Lor—”

“I wished to tell you sooner,” Lorenz babbled, no longer paying Claude any mind. “But I myself didn’t know until a few months ago—”

“Lorenz—”

“—And he’s my father. I hope you would understand that it would be a hard thing to reconcile his him with that of a crime of this magnitude. I’m sorry for not coming forward sooner—”

“Lorenz!”

Lorenz’s burgeoning rant stuttered to a stop, and he whirled to face Claude, who tried to put on his best smile.

He watched the pieces click into place behind Lorenz’s eyes.

“But… you already knew this?”

“I did,” Claude said placatingly. “But I appreciate you telling me. I really do.”

“How?”

“I was the house leader of the Golden Deer, Lorenz, even if you weren’t happy about it; I probably talked to Raphael far more than you.”

Lorenz’s brow furrowed. “He knew?”

“No, not exactly. I… His parents died in the attack that killed my uncle, did you know that?”

“I… yes.”

“Do you remember when Teach took some of us to your dad’s territory to put down some monsters?” Claude waited for Lorenz to nod before he continued. “Apparently your dad was the one who organised it all. Same as with Godfrey.”

Lorenz’s face fell. Claude guessed he hadn’t known about that.

“And you haven’t done anything?”

“All I have are rumours, Lorenz. Credible ones—mind you—but they’d never hold up at the Roundtable.” Claude leaned back against the chest of drawers and stared up at the ceiling. He sighed. “The democratic process is what makes Leicester special, but we sure would get things done faster if there was only one person making the decisions.”

Lorenz smiled, a little small, but Claude would take what he could get. “I for one can forgive a bit of slowness if it means we do things right.”

The unspoken implication made Claude’s smile falter. “I’m not coming for your dad’s head or anything. I want you to know that.”

“He killed your uncle. It wouldn’t be right of me to blame you if you were to seek such vengeance.”

“Yeah but… that’s not the kind of person I am, Lorenz. I hope you’d know that by now.”

A pause.

“I know, Claude.”

Claude smiled. “And I shouldn’t blame you for what he did, either. I really am sorry I suspected you last night. If you hadn’t been there, I’d probably be dead right now.”

Lorenz smirked. “Indeed.”

“We’re not our parents. I mean, we get a lot from them… sure,” Claude held out his fingers and began to count off on them. “Like, tea preferences and accents and what we call the cream on top of cake—”

“Icing.”

“See, _I’d_ say frosting—”

Lorenz huffed a small laugh.

“—And what I’m trying to get at is we’re always going to be a _little bit_ like our parents. But when it comes to their opinions—their actions—we can choose to disagree. We can forge our own paths, that’s what were _supposed_ to do as the next generation. We’re supposed to stand on the foundations they’ve laid for us and build something better. Something… something entirely _new_ , if we have to.”

“Sounds like a lofty goal.”

“I’m _full_ of lofty goals,” Claude laughed. “It’s why people don’t take me seriously.”

“Mhm.”

Claude grinned. “ _And_ I’d like you to help me with those lofty goals. If you’re up for it, of course.”

The door burst open.

“Knock, knock!” Hilda cried, not knocking, appearing in a flurry of breakfast platters and pink silks. “I have returned, bearing _only_ the—wait, what are you guys doing on the floor?”

Claude and Lorenz made quick eye contact over the wreckage of the broken moment. It was okay, Claude thought, they could pick this up later.

“Lorenz is judging my wardrobe,” Claude answered.

“Oh, thank the _Goddess_ , Lorenz,” Hilda chirps. “I was afraid I was going to have to start teaching this boy how to dress himself all on my own.”

She toddled over to the bed, balancing the stupid number of food platters she was carrying and deposited them on the rumpled sheets.

Claude noticed for the first time that she had changed clothes in the time she’d been gone. She was no longer dressed in the long, black mourning gown she had woken up in, but was now wearing a much more revealing pink and white number that was _much_ more her style.

“I was wondering why you were taking so long,” Claude teased. “Nice dress.”

“Thank you, Claude,” she replied. “I couldn’t exactly walk down into the kitchen with your blood all over me.”

He winced. Oh, yeah, _that_. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise. It’s better you bleed on me and live than not bleed on me and die.”

“Very practical.”

“Yes, yes. Now come get food.”

Lorenz helped Claude get to his feet and shuffle over to the bed.

Hilda had procured quite the spread from her quest to the kitchens. The platters were a mixture of cold-cut meats, fresh fruit, and hot eggs and toast. On an ordinary day it would have made Claude’s mouth water, but the residual sickness in his system was stifling his appetite.

He sat down and took a plate anyway, loading it with a few pieces of fruit and some toast while Hilda and Lorenz dug into the spread with ravenous force.

“So, what did you learn downstairs?” Claude asked. “I assume you had someone get these for you while you stood around and chatted.”

“You know me well,” Hilda said matter-of-factly. “I asked around in the kitchens to get some _insider details_ on last night.”

“Go on.”

“So, people _did_ notice that you left early, but apparently Judith just told everyone I wasn’t feeling well so you and Lorenz left to take me back to my room.”

“And they believed that?” Lorenz asked, a little incredulous.

“Most people did. I play a very good damsel in distress you know!” Hilda looked offended. “Everyone knows we went to school together anyway so it’s not too much of a stretch to say we were just catching up.”

“So, everyone thinks we left an important dinner to go play catch-up like children?” Lorenz sighed. “I suppose it’s better to be underestimated than overestimated.”

Hilda giggled. “Actually, I think they think we had sex.”

Lorenz, who had unfortunately chosen that moment to take a hearty mouthful of eggs, choked. “W-what!?”

Hilda nodded and took bite of toast. “The kitchen staff do, at least,” she said in between chews. “They’re taking bets on which one of us Claude slept with. One of the scullery maids actually had the guts to say she thought it was me to my face.”

Lorenz continued to splutter. Meanwhile, Claude plastered on a faux-offended expression and turned to Hilda.

“Only one of you?” he asked incredulously, “Why not both? I have two hands.”

Hilda slapped him upside the head.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“If you’re well enough to make gross jokes you’re well enough to eat. Now eat.” She waved her half-eaten piece of toast at his own untouched one.

“Okay, sheesh.” His stomach didn’t seem particularly excited about the selection, so he just picked up the most tasteless-looking piece of fruit and took a bite.

“I don’t know if we should be encouraging such rumours…” Lorenz said. He’d relocated himself to the writing desk, apparently unwilling to sink so low as to eat on the bed.

“Why not?” Claude asked innocently. “Are we not attractive enough for you, Lorenz?”

“I am _not_ commenting on that.”

They finished their meals in relative peace, their conversation teetering wildly from the events of the past week to the year they’d spent apart, to light reminisces on school anecdotes. It was a refreshing return to an old camaraderie that Claude had unknowingly been feeling like an ache, an ache louder and more persistent than that of the residual poison in his system.

_This won’t last forever._

Hilda got up and pulled the curtains and windows wide, allowing sunlight to stream into the room fully. It was still early out, judging by the light and pattern of birdsong that flowed into the room. But morning brought with it reminders of the day. Reminders of what was to come.

The blessed distraction afforded by breakfast had passed, and now the assassin-shaped elephant in the room was looming over them.

Guests would be waking up soon, and the staff would already be milling around. There would be people to meet, orders to give, and a funeral to attend in only a few hours. After that the funeral, and then their pool of suspects, so nicely gathered in one place, would scatter back to the four corners of the Alliance.

And there were ears everywhere.

“We should talk somewhere we won’t be overheard,” Claude said.

It was strange being back in the courtyard gardens after almost dying in them the night before, but the light of day softened the hard edges that had seared their way into Claude’s pain-crippled memory.

Hilda supported him as he walked, and Lorenz would every so often place a soothing healing spell on his back, wiping away another layer of hurt from his bones.

They arrive at the gazebo in the centre of the garden, surrounded on all sides by tall greenery that muffled the sound within. It was a good place to have an unheard conversation—it was where Claude had occasionally shared letters from home with his grandfather.

He pointedly tried not to look at the patch of grass still brown with his blood at the foot of the gazebo and climbed inside.

“These are very well-tended roses,” Lorenz said, examining the plant life as they all entered.

“I think Caius does them,” Claude said absently, lowering himself gently onto the floor. His legs twinged in protest, reminding him that while his mind had caught back up with him after last night’s ordeal, his body was still lagging a little bit behind. “You should tell him you like them. He’d probably get a kick out of someone noticing.”

“Yellow roses are often used to symbolise friendship,” Lorenz noted as Hilda joined Claude on the floor.

“That’s cute, shall I weave you a crown of them, my friend?”

Lorenz scowled at Claude. “Don’t make me rethink being nice to you.”

Hilda laughed and tugged on his trouser leg. “Get down here, dummy, we need to _scheme_.”

Lorenz huffed but obliged, settling down next to Claude and Hilda.

“This is undignified,” he complained. “Why are we hiding?”

“I think it’s kind of fun!” Hilda retorted. “It feels like we’re doing something illegal.”

Claude let them bicker for a minute while a checked the coast was totally clear. He usually would have no cause to be as paranoid as he was now within the walls of the Riegan estate, but strange times called for new measures.

“Okay,” he said, turning around swiftly. “We probably only have a few minutes before the servants realise I’m not in my room, and a few minutes after that before they find us here. So, let’s make a game plan.”

Lorenz, for some reason, raised his hand like he was in a lesson.

Claude nodded to him.

“You seemed certain last night that it was someone at the dinner,” Lorenz said. “Was that just a theory? Or do you have proof?”

Claude thought for a moment, trying to decide how best to formulate his whirling theories.

“Poison… isn’t the best way to assassinate someone,” he said finally. “Especially if you’re trying to do it subtly. If you play it right, you can kill anyone you want with poison, but there’s always a closeness between the assassin and who they’re killing that can make it traceable. You have to get access to the drink or food, which means getting into the kitchen if not literally in the same room as the victim… I was the only person with poison in my drink last night. That means whoever did it had to come into personal contact with my glass, or at least coordinated it so it was being poured out of a separate bottle. The problem is that it was given to me. I don’t know how many hands it went through before it got to me. But I do know that whoever put the poison in there had to have done it from inside the house, and we’re well-guarded.”

He was aware that Lorenz and Hilda were giving him strange looks, but he continued speaking.

“Now the toxin itself: Hyrm Needleflower… it’s really hard to get your hands on it in,” he worried his lip thoughtfully. “I basically had to _beg_ Anna to hook me up with some back at the academy. It’s incredibly difficult to work with, too. I wouldn’t expect any alchemists here to be able to distil it properly. The only ones who could do it well would have to have direct access to it.”

“Perhaps the assailant was from Hrym?” Lorenz said, and Claude didn’t miss the hopeful glimmer in his eye at the possibility this could be an attack by the Empire, rather than treason from within.

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe they’re just someone close to it?” Hilda suggested, eyes falling on Lorenz. The implication was clear to all three of them.

The culprit, if not the Empire itself, would be Hrym’s biggest international trading partners—the ones who were still doing business with them despite the war: The southern Alliance territories.

Gloucester, Ordelia, and a dozen other minor lords.

“Yeah,” Claude conceded.

It was the most likely option, all in all. The Alliance nobles were all here in one place, by invitation too. If one wanted to kill another, this was the place to do it.

“Hey, Claude?” Hilda said in a small voice. All the anxious tension seemed to bleed out of the air.

“Yeah?”

“The way you were talking about the poison…? Has… has someone tried to do something like this to you before? Kill you like this?” she asked, big sad eyes turned up at him.

Claude blanched. The answer was, of course, yes. He’d been three then six then seven then fifteen. And those were just the poisonings. From an objective standpoint his childhood had been pretty fucking harrowed. Hilda knew a little bit about his childhood in as nebulous and vague a way as he could let her in on it–but this… this was a dark window… one he wasn’t so sure he’d want them to look into.

But his mouth was moving before he could think about stopping it.

“Yes.”

The trio fell silent.

It wasn’t anything he hadn’t told anyone before. He’d told Teach, back at school, after all. But he could still feel his heart hammering in his chest. He could still feel the little boy inside screaming for them not to run, for them to stay and listen.

And they did. Hilda grabbed his hand again, giving it a strong squeeze.

“Okay then,” she said softly. “We’re not going to let it happen again. Not on our watch.”

Claude’s first thought was: _Wow, okay._

Claude’s second thought was: _No one has ever told me that before._

He wanted to say something, but Hilda was already moving on. She raised a fist and pointed her other hand to Lorenz.

“Let’s go over suspects. We have your dad—” she raised a finger, then raised more as she rattled off more names “—Count Ordelia, and then Lord Edgar and Lord Burgundy, and the rest of the lords under them—at least, the ones who are here anyway.”

“That’s still a lot of people.”

Hilda was on a roll. “And whoever attacked you… there’s no reason to think they’re going to stop at one try.”

“Probably not,” Claude sighed.

“They’re probably still here. Especially if it was one of the nobles,” Hilda continued. “Leaving early would only raise suspicion.”

Claude hummed. “If that’s the case then it might be easier to catch them in the act than try to get ahead of it.”

“So, we do nothing?” Lorenz asked.

“No, we just… wait. If it’s a staff member we can ask around to see if anyone’s left the estate. If no one has, we can get Caius to look into it for us. If it’s one of the guests, the same goes. If they don’t show up today, that’s that. If they do show up, you two stand in the wings and watch the crowd like hawks.”

“You think they’ll give themselves away that easily.”

“If I show up looking totally fine they might.”

“That’s a weak plan,” Hilda pouted.

Claude threw his hands up. “Hey, well, it’s only plan A. I’ll come up with a few more in the next few hours.”

As if on cue, a call rang out from one of the garden edges.

“Your Grace?!” Came the shout. It was one of the head maids, probably looking for him to start of preparation for the funeral. 

Claude sighed. “Duty calls.”

Hilda clasped his hand in hers. “We’ll meet back in your room before the funeral, okay?”

“Right.” He nodded.

Lorenz looked pained. “I must return to my father… try and explain my absence. I may not make it back here in time to meet prior, but I will see you at the funeral. ”

Claude put a hand on his shoulder. “Good luck, Lorenz.”

“If… If my father was the one who did this to you, I vow I will help you bring him to justice.”

“You don’t need to vow anything, Lorenz. I trust you.”

And that was true, wasn’t it?

Weird.

Lorenz smiled, and suddenly Claude felt like he needed to say more. “You… the both of you… You did everything right last night. I owe you two my life. Literally. I can’t _begin_ to imagine how I can repay you.”

Hilda snorted. “Aww! You don’t owe us. I’d kick anyone’s ass for you any day.”

She stood up on her tip-toes and give him a quick kiss on the cheek before bounding off.

Lorenz drifted up next.

“She is right, Claude,” he said. “You don’t owe us anything. Though, perhaps if you have some free time today you can finish that letter you were telling me about?”

He turned and walked off, following after Hilda.

Claude just smiled. He stood there with his hand on the railing, like a tethered boat, and watched them leave until he could see them no longer.

Claude pressed the edges of the letter together tightly with one hand, and with the other he began to steadily drip sealing wax onto the parchment.

The messenger hawk standing on the sill of his open window ducked inside, staring down at his working hands with a cocked, curious tilt to his head.

“Almost got it,” Claude said. “Be patient.”

He rummaged through his breast pocket before pulling out a seal. It wasn’t the Riegan seal–no–this one was always kept on his person; it was too incriminating to be let out of his reach.

He pressed it down into the wax and leaned down to gauge his handiwork. In the shady tones of the dark red wax, the snarling visage of a wyvern in flight, haloed by stars and nettle, stared up at him from the desk. The personal crest of the Almyran royal family was as far from home on his Fódlani desk as it had ever rightly been.

“Look good enough?”

The bird cocked his head again.

“Alright, Navid, you know where to go, right?” The hawk blinked at him. “Great.”

Claude tugged Navid over and began affixing the letter to the leather straps around his leg. Once it was tightly in place, he gave Navid a little ruffle. “Now don’t get caught, okay? I like it here!”

Navid screeched softly. Claude didn’t speak bird, but he was going to assume that meant “Of course, my dear Prince Khalid, I will most definitely carry your letter safely and swiftly. I love you very much.”

He gave the hawk a scratch under the beak, which he seemed to like. “Aww,” he crooned. “Who’s the best boy in the world? Is it you? Is it—”

“Boy!”

Both Claude and Navid squawked at the sudden interruption–the sound of his door being thrown open for the second time that day. As Claude whirled around to quickly confront the speaker, Navid screeched and flew upwards, raking his talons up Claude’s face in his mad dash to the open window.

“AH!” Claude shouted, throwing his hands up to his mouth. He whipped around to see the speaker–one Judith von Daphnel–staring at him with a slightly-shocked, mostly-disapproving expression. “Judith!! What do you want?!”

“What _are_ you doing?” she asked, planting a hand on her hip.

“Sending a letter!” he whined. He began to poke at his lip. “Am I bleeding?”

Judith strode over and snatched up Claude’s face in one hand, giving him a once over with those steely eyes. “You’re fine,” she assessed. “Don’t be a baby.”

“I’m not—”

“Who are you writing to?” Judith asked, nodding out the window. Claude turned to see Navid, already a small dot in the distant sky.

“Mom,” he said simply.

Judith sighed.

Silence stretched between them a little awkwardly.

“Are you… well?” She eventually asked stiffly. As much as she was trying, nurturing would not be one of the first ways Claude would describe Judith.

“I’m not dead,” he said dryly. “That’s a start.”

“I’m glad you’re not dead, boy.”

“Ah, your kind words warm my heart, Judith.”

Judith rolled her eyes and scoffed before tugging Claude into a bone-crushing embrace. A lot of people were hugging him today. He didn’t hate it.

“Oof,” was all he managed to say.

“You are perhaps the most dim-witted Riegan I’ve ever met,” she said, and he felt her sigh. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“You sound like mom,” Claude said, voice uncomfortably muffled in her jacket.

“Good,” she said, pulling back and cuffing him over the head. “Someone has to keep you in line if she won’t.”

Claude closed the window while Judith sat down in one of the armchairs. He joined her a moment later, sinking into the free one but still feeling very much like he was in a job interview in his own home with how intense Judith’s stare was.

“Tell me your plan,” she said.

Claude regaled her with the details of his discussion with Lorenz and Hilda. Everything from the details of the poison to Lorenz’s hesitant suspicion of his father to how they were going to try and single out suspects.

“Getting your suspects in one place is one thing,” Judith noted. “But just watching them for a reaction probably won’t be enough. Do you have any specific suspects?”

“In terms of guests we’re fairly certain only the Lords who have trade channels with Hrym or have river borders could probably have access to the type of poison that was used.”

“Hmm,” Judith said. “Alright, that’s good. Focus on those lords specifically. Start asking around some of the others to see what they know, too.”

“Like who?”

“Cornwall always has her eye on Gloucester,” Judith mused. “Edmund is also a pretty keen gossip when he needs to be. Just make sure you’re not giving away too much information if you do talk to them. You’re right that anyone could still be a suspect.”

Claude exhaled sharply, sinking further into his chair. “Will do,” he said.

Judith smirked. “I’ll keep an eye out as well,” she said. “I think you’ve got a good plan.”

“Thanks.”

“In return for my help, though, I’m actually looking for something of mine that your grandfather was holding onto.”

Claude sat up quirked an eyebrow. “What is it?”

“It’s an ornamental rapier. About this long—” Judith showed the length with her hands. “—he was getting it re-engraved for me.”

Ornamental rapier… engraved…

“Oh, hold on,” Claude said, suddenly remembering. “I think I _have_ seen that.”

Judith smiled. “Great.”

“It’s in his office,” Claude said, getting to his feet. “I’ll go get it.”

He left the bedchamber and crossed the attached sitting room to his grandfather’s office door. He pulled out the keys but stopped short.

Odd, he was sure he had left it locked yesterday.

Cautiously, Claude eased the door open. He was greeted, a little anti-clcimatically, with the same messy, unused room he had shown Hilda yesterday. Boxes on the floor and desk, chests and packages, lying unopened, the mount on the wall, upon which sat—

Shit.

_Fuck._

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Claude burst back into the bedroom, causing Judith’s head to snap towards him in alarm.

“J-Judith!” he gasped.

Judith was on her feet now. “What is it?”

Claude took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Where the _fuck_ is Failnaught?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As we say in the business: Uh-oh, Spaghetti-O!  
> Scheduling note: I'm prepping for some important lab work next week, so I might be a bit slower with the next chapter than I have been with these ones. I do have a little interlude things fo you though! So stay tuned.
> 
> Lots of notes! Lots of notes!:
> 
> Claude, Hilda, and Lorenz went to the Hamlet school of getting people to confess to shit which is just show up and watch em real close to see if they freak out. It's foolproof.
> 
> Before anyone says “Claude labelling his things in Almyran is too risky! He’d never do it!” one of his lost items is literally a quiver with “““foreign script””” on it. Like, homeboy just left that on the ground at Garreg Mach where anyone could (and did) pick it up. So you say “Claude’s too smart” and I raise you “he…a lil stoopid?”
> 
> Lorenz knowing Faith magic is a direct holdover from my playthrough, where I accidentally got him to like, C rank in it without noticing.


	4. Interlude: Khalid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the desk of ~~Duke Claude von Riegan~~ Prince Khalid Al-Almyra

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gotta stop posting these chapters I'm running out of my buffer lol.
> 
> [vibe check 4: a vibe's end](https://open.spotify.com/track/5FaoIIm5ouX8kbz5XNCUgg?si=wqlCAo5_R72bD3KxHD13iQ)

_ATTN: Western Branch Spymaster._

_Ira’s Passage, 40 mi. north of Fodlan’s Locket. Unpatrolled for 8 days starting 31 Harpstring Moon. Should be safe for new crossings. Advise scouts on Almyran border side that further missives are no longer to be delivered directly to Derdriu. New drop locations enclosed._

_K._

* * *

_ATTN: Western Branch Spymaster._

_Missive enclosed is for the attention of the royal family only and is to be delivered to the queen immediately. Missive is to be immediately destroyed upon the event of capture by Fódlani forces. _

_K._

* * *

_Dear Mother,_

_This letter has come about through quite a few revisions. I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t written to you as much as either of us would have liked, but there have been some events that you need to be informed of and I couldn't afford to wait any longer._

_Grandfather has passed away. This doesn’t surprise anyone, really, but at least we can say it was peaceful, and he held on much longer than anyone thought he would. He was a tough bastard. I can see where you get it from._

_There’s probably a world out there where I feel more than just a little sad over his death, and I think I’m right in guessing that’s the world you’d like to live in, but I can’t lie to you, mom, I don’t think I knew the man well enough to miss him more than I’d miss a friend. I feel a little bad about that. People keep telling me I look like Godfrey, too. I think I’m mad that doesn't mean as much to me as it means to them._

_Gramps kept his word, though. I’m writing this the day before my first roundtable conference as Duke Riegan. Normally they’d stretch it out a bit longer, inject a bit more pomp and circumstance into the whole shebang, but this being wartime I think it’s just going to be a small affair. I d_ _on’t know how often you get news of the war out there, but it’s going shit. The Empire hasn’t set foot on our soil but the Alliance is still somehow on the verge of tearing itself apart. I’m trying to spin that in my favour, but I don’t know how long I can last._

_Some of my friends arrived in the city. I’m sure I’ve mentioned the class I led at Garreg Mach? This is two of them. The first is Hilda Goneril, and before you rub your temples and say something like “Khalid, you little moron! Why are you talking to a Goneril??” I just want to say she's like my best friend so be nice. When she arrived yesterday out of nowhere? Gods, mom… I don’t think I’d realised how damn lonely I was until right then. I think you’d like her; she can swing an axe better than I could ever hope to. I honestly think baba would like her, too. He’d definitely get a kick out of her work ethic, that’s for sure. If this whole war thing tips in our favour, I think I'd like to bring her to meet you all._

_The other is Lorenz Gloucester, who I don’t think either of you would like so I’ll be leaving him behind on this hypothetical visit. He’s a bit pretentious and a LOT high strung, but who wouldn't be with a dad like that? I'm realising that we might care about each other too, which is weird, because until this morning I sorta thought he hated me. He’s charming in his own way, that Lorenz. He grows on you. Like purple mold._

_He actually gave me some good advice today. He said it would be “pertinent to be honest” with you, saying that you could probably give me some valuable insight into the things that are worrying me. He had a point. You’re pretty much the smartest person I know. So here goes:_

_I guess… I’m just scared. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to admit that to you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look as scared as I feel now. Maybe that’s why._ _I’m scared of what’s to come. As much as I think I’ve got a knack for it, I’ve never led anything bigger than a school house_ — _not on my own, at least. I don’t want to disappoint anyone and I don’t want to disappoint Gramps most of all. I’m scared of where I stand, too; everything’s changing so fast around me and I’m not sure my footing is strong enough to weather the coming storm. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed just watching the damn thing approach._

_And on top of all that, now I have to win a war, or at least stay out of it long enough for a miracle or a Goddess or something else entirely to swoop in and save my ass. I just wish I didn’t have to fight my classmates to do it._

_Wow! That was kind of a downer! Anyway, I'm already writing really tiny and still running out of paper so I'd better wrap this up! I hope all is well back home! I miss you all every day! Give my love to baba and the girls for me if they’re not already reading this over your shoulder. Hi everyone!_

_Forever your loving son,_

_Khalid._

_PS: In the interest of being honest I just wanted to let you know that someone poisoned me at the funeral welcome dinner but it’s all good! Those friends I mentioned are helping and everything is totally, one-hundred percent fine and we have it handled so don’t worry!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lorenz: Don’t be afraid to tell your mother what happened! Honesty is the best policy!
> 
> Claude, writing about his poisoning in the post-script: Good thing this is in a letter so I can wait 5-7 business days before my ass-whooping gets here.
> 
> Unrelated note: How's the impending death of civilization as we know it at the hands of COVID-19 treating everyone? Anyone in quarantine? I'm not yet but I'm feeling a bit nervous anyway. But hey! If I get locked in my house at least I'll have time to finish this fic!  
> Stay safe out there everyone!


	5. Lorenz II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a cliffhanger is ignored and a father-son meal is shared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote upwards of 5k of political exposition for this chapter. Oops.
> 
> Also, hey! We got a canon name for Claude! I've updated it in the previous chapters. Goodbye, Selim. You were a good friend. 
> 
> [vibe check 5: guardians](https://open.spotify.com/track/5DN1QdgodyvoM4efdXUR1c?si=ergM71C2SN60NEnZSLAkYg)

The Alliance was host to many beautiful sights. Soaring mountains, lush glens, vast plains and a vibrant northern coast. But, in Lorenz’s opinion, the port city of Derdriu was one of its most beautiful. 

Derdriu had many names, but Lorenz’s favourite was the City of Sails. It had earned its name for its port, which in the warmer months boomed with such ferocity the docks would be packed with the towering peaks of sailing ships so densely that one could barely see the sea beyond.

White banners and sails, as sharp and clear as the wings of great sea birds, fluttered in the summer winds. It was here on the waterfront, brimming with the smell of sea salt and an eclectic mix of merchant spices, that many of the Alliance’s noble families chose to build homes.

Gloucester was no different. Lorenz’s family had held a beautiful two-storey townhouse on the eastern harbour for generations. Of their many homes in many territories, this one was Lorenz’s favourite. It had perfect views of the sea and was only a brisk walk away from his favourite tea shop in the northern Alliance. But, unfortunately, it was also the home he had failed to return to last night. It was where his father—Claude’s potential assassin—sat now, waiting for an explanation.

He took a carriage from the Riegan estate down the hill into the city but got off earlier than he needed to. It was half an excuse to see a bit more of Derdriu in all its early morning splendour, and half and excuse to put off speaking to his father.

He really wasn’t looking forward to it in the slightest.

As he approached the townhouse, one of the guards posted outside bowed. “Good morning, Lord Gloucester,” he said.

“Good morning,” Lorenz replied politely. “Are my parents in?”

“You father is inside, milord,” the guard reported. “Your mother is out, unfortunately, though she should be back within the hour.”

That was okay, he just needed to see his father.

_And say what?_

Lorenz shook his head and entered the house.

The interior was still dark and cold. Lorenz knew his father was likely taking breakfast, but he let his feet guide him to his room first. His luggage sat untouched at the foot of his still-made bed after his failure to return last night, and Lorenz deftly ignored it in favour of drifting into the ensuite, stripping off his outer layers as he did. By the time he reached the mirror he was only in his rumpled dress-shirt and slacks, and he stared himself up and down.

His shirt was smeared with dried blood. Mostly on the sleeves from all his grabbing and jostling of Claude, but the one that chilled him the most was streaking across his left-side ribs; a bloody handprint where Claude had steadied himself while drawing on Lorenz’s hand. The finger marks were visible, blood driven deeper into the soft linen where the duke had dug his nails into the fabric in pain.

Lorenz looked down at his hand. The foreign symbol Claude had traced onto it in his own blood was still slightly visible, now cracked and brown and flaking away. It had lost its gentle swirling shape, not that the shape had been at all appealing anyway due to the medium.

Lorenz fetched a pitcher of clean water off the windowsill and began to pour it over his hand, awkwardly pausing every so often to scrub until the mark was gone.

He filled the basin next, before shucking off his shirt and trying as hard as he could to scrub the blood out of that too. All he succeeded in doing was turning the water a dirty, ruddy brown. The dark stains on the shirt faded somewhat, but he knew the thing wouldn’t be salvageable.

Lorenz sighed and wandered out into his room. He folded up his shirt and tucked it away in his luggage, planning to dispose of it before they left the city. He pulled out a fresh one at got to the business of getting dressed.

The funeral was today, so Lorenz’s chosen clothes were predictably even more dour than his clothes from last night. They were all black and fine without being extravagant, with the only piece of flair being ornamental silver spaulders Lorenz had quite a time attempting to affix to his shoulders without help.

Content with his work and realising his procrastination time had run out, Lorenz left his room and headed back down into the living areas of the house. He located the dining room easily and knocked before entering.

“Enter.”

He pushed the door open.

The Gloucester’s dining room was all dark wood and flowers. Vases of fresh-cut roses of various shades lined the walls. A dark oak table made up the centrepiece, and Lorenz’s father sat at the head of it.

“Lorenz. How nice of you to finally come home.”

Count Gloucester was likewise dressed in his formalwear with his dark indigo hair tied back, though he had yet to attach their ceremonial armour like Lorenz had. He was sitting down with breakfast in front of him, straight backed and regal as always, tending to a pile of letters while he ate.

“I apologise, father,” Lorenz said, feeling small. “Time… got away from me.”

“Evidently,” the Count said. He wasn’t making eye contact “Take a seat.”

It wasn’t a request. Lorenz circled around to the empty table setting across from his father. He pulled out the chair and sat down, ignoring the way it screeched on the hardwood floor.

A servant immediately appeared with breakfast. Lorenz was tempted to wave her away under the pretence of having eaten at the Riegan estate, but he knew that admission likely wouldn’t go down well with his father. He held his tongue and allowed himself to be served.

“Coffee?” the Count asked, taking a sip of his own. Lorenz shook his head.

“No thank you,” Lorenz replied.

They fell into silence as the Count finished his meal and Lorenz started his own. It was eggs and toast, humble but likely well-seasoned. He swallowed it down with little effort, but it remained tasteless in the face of his roiling thoughts.

He was not left alone for long.

The Count sighed and lowered one of the letters, staring out over his reading glasses at Lorenz. “May I at least ask which one it was?”

Lorenz frowned. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

“It’s quite simple, Lorenz,” the Count said. “Which one? I suppose they are both quite attractive, if nothing else…”

The air was pierced by an unholy screeching sound, and Lorenz realised a beat into the ensuing silence that it was his own fork, clutched in a white-knuckled grip, slipping across his plate.

“Father,” he said in a low voice. “I will assure you once more that your accusations are ridiculous. I was not cavorting around last night, I was—”

 _Saving Claude’s life,_ he wanted to say, _because he was poisoned and you might already know that, father, because it every well may have been your doing._

But he doesn’t say anything of the sort. Lorenz is not so brave as that, and he is not so disloyal to Claude. Claude who, through a haze of pain, had been so desperate to keep last night’s events a secret. Adamant to keep a perceived weakness from the eyes of his supposed allies.

_I will not betray him, even if I don’t agree._

“—I was just catching up. It has been over a year since I’ve seen either of them and we had much to discuss. By the time we had finished it was too late to order a carriage, so Cl—Duke Riegan allowed me stay in one of the guest rooms.”

His father’s expression grew tight. “He did, did he?”

It was a small rebellion, to call Claude by his title in private quarters with his father, who only extended formality to the young duke when not doing so would belittle his noble image.

Among the Golden Deer, names had been freely given in a way they weren’t in the other houses. This was, in part, due to the slightly less hierarchical political nature of their home nation, but also, perhaps, it was just their way. With the same fervour with which the Blue Lions had lavished their leader with formal address, the Golden Deer had strayed far away from giving each other any semblance of formality.

They weren’t lords and ladies when they were together. They were Raph and Iggy and Leo, they were Mari and Hils and ‘Sithee (met with a glare), and they were Claude and Lorenz—first names only—Riegan and Gloucester reserved for use only in particularly harsh scoldings.

In a way, their names were precious things as much as they were pointless. It had taken Lorenz a long time to come to terms with the idea that they should hold less weight—that a bare first name, huffed through a laugh or carried along a fond whisper, should be more important than a moniker laden with the decorum of a family legacy. It had taken Lorenz far too long to become comfortable with the idea. Far too long indeed.

However, for all the lessons his friends had taught him, he had attempted to teach them his own. For in the world of nobles, names were everything. They were commodities not easily given, oft shrouded and gilded in equal measure by titles. Titles were a language, a delicate tongue of offense and reverence. A careful use of one here, a delicate removal of one there. It could make all the difference. It could say everything without saying anything.

 _Duke Riegan allowed me to stay,_ Lorenz said, and what he meant was, _Claude is the Duke and I am not so upset by that fact as you, father._

“Yes,” the Count said slowly. “The Duke is quite accommodating, is he not?”

He turned back to his letter, brow creasing into a frown. Lorenz felt a twinge of curiosity.

“What are you reading?” He asked. His father let out a surprisingly weary sigh.

“It’s from Acheron,” he said dryly.

 _Oh. Gross._ Lorenz made a face. He’d been glad Acheron hadn’t bothered hauling himself to Derdriu for the funeral, but apparently hundred of miles wasn’t enough for Lorenz to fully escape the man.

“What business can he possibly have that cannot wait for your return?” Lorenz said, the aggravation in his voice much less disguised than his father’s. “Is he writing to tell you he’s changed the locks on the estate while we’ve been gone?”

That actually made his father laugh.

“Fortunately he’s keeping to himself,” he chuckled. “Though I don’t think it would hurt to check the silverware is still there when we get home.”

“What’s he writing about?” Lorenz asked.

“You seemed distracted last night, so I’m sure you didn’t hear,” the Count supplied. “It’s about a proposal he and Edgar are trying to prepare for the roundtable.”

Lorenz frowned, thinking back to last night. “You and Edgar were talking about tariffs on the Kingdom, no? Is Acheron in support?”

“Indeed, but that’s not the problem. They are also discussing ceding control of part of Acheron’s territory to the Empire. They want me to bring it forward tomorrow.”

Lorenz dropped his fork.

“Y–you can’t!” He cried, aghast.

“I never said I _would_ , Lorenz.”

“That is _far_ more drastic a measure than mere _tariffs_.” Lorenz was baffled. What were his father’s constituents _thinking_?

The Count scoffs at the thought. “I am well aware. That’s why I won’t be putting forward the proposal tomorrow, as I told Edgar last night. And a week ago. And a month ago. Those two are persistent.”

Lorenz’s mind was still reeling. Ceding Alliance territory? To what possible end? To appease an Empire before it aimed its maw at them?

_To lie belly up and wait for the teeth to sink in._

Lorenz already fostered a great dislike for Acheron that ran deep. He’d tried to annex part of his father’s territory while Lorenz had been at the academy, and he’d ridden out to put the attempt down himself. Afterwards, Acheron had some crawling back, clawing at the doors to his father’s favour like a starving hound.

‘Spineless’ was the word Lorenz would use to describe him best. It appeared that was still apt.

Lorenz was pulled from his reverie by his father’s continued speech. “Regardless of if I supported them or not, Riegan and his guard-dogs at the Throat wouldn’t stand for it.” The Count let the letter fall to the table. “Neither would the Margrave, and Count Ordelia wanted nothing to do with us last night so I’d wager he’d be unsupportive too.”

“I’d hope they wouldn’t be,” Lorenz said incredulously. “We haven’t even been _attacked_. Pre-emptively ceding territory to an enemy that hasn’t even set foot over our borders is…”

“Cowardly?” His father suggested. “Careful. Such language may make one sound eager for war.”

Lorenz’s jaw snapped shut.

“Ah, there’s the rub,” the Count mused, wrapping his hands around his coffee. “How eager are we for war? A good question. I disagreed with Oswald on most everything, you know, but he’d lived through our bloodiest conflict with Almyra in a century and he knew the cost. What could a child of peacetime like Claude von Riegan know of the cost of war?”

“He won’t throw us into war.”

“He’s still a boy, Lorenz. I did not succeed my father until I was thirty. Untested children fresh from the academy do not inspire confidence.”

Untested. Lorenz remembered Garreg Mach in ruin. Soot in his mouth and hands numb from spell slinging. He remembered Claude, dragging him back from the fight with a hand torn raw from his bowstring’s overuse, both of them so covered in blood they couldn’t tell who it belonged to anymore. He remembered Hilda yanking her axe out of a once beating chest, Marianne tripping over corpses to heal Ignatz, Leonie providing cover back-to-back with Lysithea, Raphael throwing them all into the back of a moving cart with the scant belongings they’d managed to grab.

Byleth. Dead.

Untested.

Lorenz balled his hands into fists under the table and hoped his father didn’t notice.

“This war will be fought by children,” Lorenz said. It would be fought by his generation—the young and able-bodied.

“It’s _led_ by them,” his father reiterated. “Our very own duke, yes, but the Emperor herself is no more than a child either. That’s not to mention Faerghus’s dead boy-king. Though his blood is long cold on the streets of Fhirdiad those stubborn northern nobles still rally behind him.”

“So, you mean to underestimate them?”

The Count scoffed. “I am no idiot, boy. I have no doubt they are capable, but their youth makes them unpredictable and wild.”

Lorenz grit his teeth. “But Claude _is_ Duke Riegan. You can’t change that.”

_No matter how much you’ve tried in the past._

The Count sighed. The tension broke.

“I know.”

That took Lorenz by surprise.

His father was not a good liar. He didn’t need to be. Unlike nobles like Claude, who relished in keeping their cards close through deception and secrecy, Count Gloucester made his business in standing so far back from the action that even the truth wouldn’t get him caught in anything unsavoury.

He always had people to do his dirty work for him, and he was a bad liar because of it. Lorenz was confident he was not lying now. He was not lying when he said:

“Everything I have ever done has been for what I thought was the best interests of our people.”

He didn’t have to say what he was talking about. He’d never said it out loud before, but he knew Lorenz knew what he had done to Godfrey.

“We are not like the Kingdom, Lorenz, and Goddess forbid we are like the Empire.” The Count’s voice was quiet but firm. “As ruling nobles, we are indeed responsible for the wellbeing of all citizens of the Alliance, but our primary responsibility is to those residing in our territories. The Alliance is not led by one person. We are _guided_ by our most powerful house, but our decisions of state are not to be made by an all-powerful monarch.

“The Riegans have led the coalition for over a century. That kind of control… would one not assume it would lend itself to the notions of our nation favouring the residents of Riegan territory above the others? Does their influence not give them the ability to skew our resources towards Derdriu? Twist our international policies to their preferences? That is, of course, only if their family head would be so inclined to behave that way.”

There was a lull in his speech, and Lorenz realised he was supposed to speak.

“Duke Oswald didn’t favour Riegan,” he said. Of this he was sure.

“Perhaps you are right,” the Count replied. “But that is not to say his sensibilities passed to his children… or their children.”

Lorenz could tell his father wasn’t done talking, merely pausing for effect or perhaps to align his thoughts, so he remained silent.

“The Riegan siblings loved many things more than they loved Leicester,” the Count mused. “Tiana… she loved love… she was in love with the idea of love, the pursuit of it, the idealised trueness of it… she didn’t understand the kind of sacrifices we must make for our countries on that front. Every suitor I ever saw tossed in front of her was tossed right back like one would toss a bad cut of meat to their dogs. She wasn’t made for the life of a noble daughter.”

Marrying politically was one of the lessons Count Gloucester had drilled in his son with particular fervour from a young age. Marrying for love was a luxury, one that custom did not often permit. Lorenz was… fine with that. Perhaps. He was quite sure his parents liked each other, maybe even loved each other in the end, and he was okay with that being his fate too.

“She disappeared,” the Count continued in a quiet voice. He sounded a little bitter. “I presume she found someone in whatever backwater she slunk off to. Obviously. I do hope it was all worth it.”

He took another sip of his coffee and leaned back in his chair.

“Godfrey. His loves weren’t so simple. Godfrey was made for social life where his sister wasn’t. He could walk the walk and talk the talk, like a true noble, but he loved the life too much. He loved the light and colour of this city… relished in its women, wine, and parties. One can’t lead like that. He couldn’t see the forest for the trees, so the old saying goes; too caught up in the day-to-day to see the aches in his country’s corners.”

Irresponsibility. Short-sightedness. Were these the reasons Godfrey was marked a dead man in Lorenz’s father’s eyes? Was incompetence enough to warrant death? It made Lorenz’s blood cold.

“The question to ask is this, then,” the Count continued. “Is your scope so wide as to not see the people you serve and protect? Or is your scope so limited as to only care about you and your own. I fear I have made mistakes. I have been guilty of the latter. But if I was guilty of the latter then Claude is guilty of the former.”

“How do you mean?” Lorenz enquired, his voice weak.

His father’s eyes narrowed. “He is young. Idealistic. If his uncle’s flaw was that he couldn’t see the forest for the trees, then his is that he cannot see the trees for the forest. He deals in abstracts—in fantasy. He is unpredictable. I do not believe he is fit to lead.”

Lorenz understood where his father was coming from. A true leader needed to make concessions. A true leader couldn’t be biased. A true leader couldn’t lose sight of the people they protected.

“Then that’s where we must disagree, father,” he found himself saying.

The Count affixed Lorenz with a calculating stare.

Lorenz continued. “I have been led by him before, albeit in a school setting, but I have fought alongside him. He’s a capable leader because he knows the people he rides with. He made an effort to see us, to understand us…”

Lorenz didn’t exactly know where this staunch defence of Claude was coming from. He’d certainly never said anything like this to his father before. He supposed it must be because while his father talked about Claude’s naiveite, Lorenz’s mind was casting back to the young man curled up in a dark garden, broken and bleeding, begging Lorenz not to shatter his image of manufactured strength. Now that the heat of the moment had passed, Lorenz knew it was the right call—the Alliance was a precariously balanced chessboard, and any weakness could send the whole think crashing to the floor.

He thought of Claude now, no doubt preparing for the funeral, smiling through gritted teeth and sliced innards not fully healed. Holding everything together.

For the first time in his life, Lorenz was confident that Claude might know what he was doing. That feeling likely would not last forever—he doubted that very much. But for now, he would exercise this small rebellion. He would tell his father the truth of the matter.

“I know him, and I think I am inclined to trust him,” Lorenz said. “At least for the most part.”

The Count stared at him for a while before sighing.

“Alright,” he said. A concession. Not a win. A pause.

Lorenz could let this moment slip away. He could finish his breakfast and leave. But he was riding some kind of high and he was not remotely close to being done yet.

“Do you regret doing it?” He asked.

He doesn’t have to say what. Godfrey looms like a spectre.

His father was silent for a long moment before he said, “Of course.”

“A mistake?” Lorenz ventured quietly.

His father’s hand, which was resting on the table, tensed into a fist for just a moment. Count Gloucester brought his dark eyes up to meet Lorenz’s with a stifling intensity.

“Yes,” he said. “One I unfortunately cannot take back.”

Lorenz didn’t ask for more, but his father kept talking.

“Our eastern neighbours call us cowards, and perhaps, in that moment, I was one. A true noble cares for his people. I believed that was what I was doing—removing someone that would hurt them in the future—but all I was doing was swimming against the current. There are those in this country that believe custom is a plague, that the system of hierarchy that puts a boy like Claude at the head of our table simply because of his crest is a shackle. But without tradition what are we? This coalition is hard work but it’s our ability to cooperate that sets us apart. This independence is why our ancestors left the Holy Kingdom.

“We don’t take matters into our own hands in the Alliance. We work together and for that our governance is slow, but it is fair. I regret ignoring that fact. Anyone who forfeits that cooperation is no true friend to Leicester.”

Lorenz suddenly became aware of several things at once.

The first was that something in his relationship with his father had irrevocably shifted. They talked, of course, but his father had never opened up like this to him. He’d never spoken to him of his feelings on their country in such a free and unfettered manner. It was freeing, but simultaneously forced a new distance between them. Lorenz loved his father, but he was no longer entirely beholden to him.

The second was that his father did not try to have Claude killed last night.

The third was that he was pretty sure he knew who _had_.

Lorenz got his feet, his breakfast barely touched.

The Count frowned. “Where are you going?”

“I am returning to the Riegan Estate. I will see you there later.”

He was gone before he could hear his father’s reply.

Lorenz stumbled out of the front door and into the busy morning street and immediately took off. He needed to return to his carriage immediately and he was not too proud to not run there.

Halfway back to the carriage stop, however, he was too swift rounding a corner and barrelled straight into someone.

“Oh! Excuse me, Master Gloucester, I didn’t see you there.”

“Oh, I apologise–” Lorenz took a step back and blinked, taking in the man in front of him. “C-Caius? Yes?”

Caius, steward of the Riegan estate, bowed low. “Indeed, milord. I apologise for running into you, you seem to be in quite a hurry.”

“I- No… no, it’s quite alright.”

Caius was pulling a modest sized hand cart behind him, laden down with several large packages wrapped in leathers and paper. It was an odd sight.

“May I enquire what you’re doing in the city today, Caius?” Lorenz asked. “I would have expected you to be preparing for the ceremonies.”

Caius laughed. “I was, but alas some errands came up quite suddenly. I am just delivering some packages to the river-port. I’m afraid I must be on my way.”

He was gone before Lorenz could say anything, trundling down the road towards the port. It was certainly a strange interaction, but Lorenz dashed that thought from his mind. He had to hurry! He had more pressing concerns.

The carriage ride back to the Riegan estate was excruciatingly slow. By the time Lorenz arrived the sun was fully in the sky. It was only a few hours until the funeral. He had to hurry.

He was stopped, however, but two men in dark dress-wear were standing in the foyer when Lorenz entered. They turned as Lorenz approached and he instantly recognised them.

“Count Ordelia! Margrave!” Lorenz greeted, half out of surprise. “Good morning!”

Ordelia raised an eyebrow. “Lorenz? You’re here quite early.”

Lorenz tried to think of a lie and settled on the truth. “I have business with the Duke.”

Ordelia nodded. “I’m afraid I’m in the same position, though no one seems to be able to pin him down.”

Lorenz was about to ask what that meant when Ordelia kept talking.

“You were with your father just now?” He asked. Lorenz nodded. “Acheron and Edgar are still needling him? You should let him know Burgundy and I won’t be roped into anything.”

“You know about that?” Lorenz was a little taken aback before he remembered

“I am, technically, a southern lord. I _am_ told things.” Ordelia sighed. “I think they’re under the impression I’m stupid. I am not fond of their tendency to assume I will ally with them in Imperial matters just because I share the same border as them.”

“You disagree with their proposal?”

Ordelia shrugged. “Tariffs on the Kingdom, no. I’m for that. Duke Oswald was on the verge of proposing something similar, it’s just a matter of if Claude decides to continue those proposals. I don’t agree with ceding Myrddin, though. I’m glad your father isn’t playing along for now.”

“Ceding Myrddin? That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Edmund said. “They want Dorian to propose something like that?”

Lorenz could feel his heart hammering in his chest. He needed to find Claude. He couldn’t be here.

“I must be going,” Lorenz said, cutting the men off, trying to hold together any modicum of control. “I’m sorry I can’t stay.”

The Margrave waved the apology away. “It’s no trouble, Lorenz. It seems everyone is in a bit of a rush this morning, doesn’t it?”

Lorenz frowned. “How do you mean, Margrave?”

“Claude—uh, the duke has been running around like a chicken without a head the whole morning,” Edmund replied.

Lorenz had been under the impression Claude would be resting off the last of his injuries. Unfortunately, it seemed he was going to have to add ‘common sense’ to the listen of things to stop expecting of the man. What was he doing?

“Do you know where he is?” Lorenz asked.

“He’s in the Roundtable hall,” said a voice that very much did not belong to any of the men present.

Lorenz spotted Judith appear from around a corner. He wasn’t sure how long she’d been listening in, though it was apparently long enough to catch the last part of the conversation. She strode forward.

She was dressed in a slightly-less combat-ready garb than the previous night, but it was still an unlady-like mixture of trousers and a jacket. It was all black, rather than gold, and she carried an ornate sabre at her side.

“Judith! How lovely to see you,” the Margrave said with a grin. “You look only slightly more ancient than you did yesterday!”

Judith smirked. “Francis. Rhys. I see you two have continued to perfect the art of taking up space well into adulthood. If only they gave out medals for such a feat.”

To Lorenz’s shock and horror, Edmund just laughed. Even Ordelia smiled a little.

“What can we help you with?” Ordelia asked.

Judith nodded to Lorenz. “I need to borrow the grape.”

Lorenz was tugged away before he could give proper farewells, but Judith didn’t appear to care at all. She dragged him off down an empty hall and pulled him close. 

“Failnaught’s been stolen,” she said in a hushed tone. “It’s probably no longer on the estate.”

Lorenz froze.

“WHA—”

Judith’s hand was over his mouth in an instant. She pulled him down a side corridor and kept walking. Her nails dug into his arm.

“Shut _up_ , boy,” she hissed. “Did your father never teach you about subtlety? Probably not.”

Lorenz carefully removed her hand from his face. “What do you _mean_ Failnaught was stolen?”

“I _mean_ someone snuck into Claude’s chambers last night before your three-man comedy troupe stumbled in and stole it right off the wall. Probably the same person that poisoned him.”

Lorenz thought back to Ordelia and Edmund’s words. “Is that why Claude’s been in a rush all morning?”

“Yep.” Judith pulled him down another winding corridor. “He’s worried about a repeat of what happen with that Gautier kid.”

Lorenz’s brain short-circuited at that. “Who? Sylvain!?”

Judith rolled her eyes. “No, the one that blew himself up.”

“Oh.”

Miklan.

A stolen Relic, in the hands of someone without a crest, was a time bomb. Not many were privy to that information, though. The Archbishop had decided to smother it to avoid a panic among both the noble class and their subjects. Only those present walked away with the truth. Those present—and the people they told, of course. They were children, no one should have expected them to stay fully quiet on such a matter.

So, Judith knew, which meant Claude trusted her enough to have told her against Rhea’s wishes. That was interesting.

“What do you know about them, boy? Claude was vague when he told me.”

“The relic beasts?”

Judith nodded.

Lorenz cast his mind back. “I think we’re only at risk if a crestless individual uses the weapon. Touching it should be no problem.”

Judith guided them around another corner. “I can’t picture someone stealing it for the fun. There are plenty of nicer-looking bows you don’t have to kill a Duke for,” she picked absently at her fingernail as she spoke. “Maybe someone with a crest wants it.”

“Someone from the Empire?”

Judith shrugged. “Sure. They had archers in that little murderer magnet-class, didn’t they? Maybe the Royal Horror to the south wants to kit out her friends?”

Who? _Bernadetta?_ Lorenz tried to picture her holding Failnaught, which he’d put money on being as tall, if not taller, than her. It was ridiculous, but not totally unbelievable that Edelgard would want weapons of Failnaught’s calibre for her soldiers.

“You think the Empire wants Failnaught for its own use?”

Judith nodded. “Sure, maybe. Or maybe they just want to hit us where they know it’s going to hurt. Claude isn’t the most well-liked guy but he’s got sway and his ascendency is going to introduce a brand new player into this three-way game we’re all trapped in. By killing him and taking a treasured relic the Empire would crush our autonomy as a nation. Our confidence, too. How are we supposed to stand up to a force that can so easily sneak through our borders and rip apart a founding house?”

It was maybe the most Lorenz had ever heard Judith speak at once. It almost left him stunned.

“But they didn’t put the poison in his drink,” he managed to say.

“No, they would have had to work with someone in the Alliance, someone whose interests aligned at least somewhat with theirs.” Judith smirked. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“No. No, it’s not hard to believe at all.”

Judith chuckled. “You sound like you have an idea, boy. I didn’t know Gloucesters could get those.”

“I might,” Lorenz admitted, ignoring the barb.

Judith looked pleased. “Then let’s find Claude. He’ll want to hear it.”

The door to the Roundtable chamber was slightly ajar when they arrived, and Lorenz could hear Claude before he saw him.

“—and how am I supposed to sit on my ass for an _hour_ and listen to a priest yarn about how great Gramps was when Failnaught’s out there _Gods_ know where getting ready to turn someone into a demonic beast?”

Judith eased the door open and the pair stepped inside. Hilda was the most immediately noticeable, sitting on the eponymous roundtable in her pink and black mourning ensemble with her legs swinging back and forth. She was watching Claude as he paced back and forth on the far side of the room. Neither appeared to have noticed them enter.

“Terrible,” Hilda was saying unsympathetically. “You _hate_ going to church.”

Lorenz got the impression Claude had been talking about this for a while or Hilda would probably sound a tad more sympathetic.

“Look at me!” he hissed. “Not even a _week_ into this title and I’ve already almost died _and_ lost my family’s most valuable possession. What would my grandfather think?”

“I don’t know what _he’d_ think,” Hilda said lazily. “But _I_ think you’re having a panic attack.”

Claude scoffed. “You think?”

“Hey, circus!” Judith called out, shoving Lorenz into the room. “I found your missing clown.”

Claude and Hilda whirled around to face the new additions and Lorenz watched Claude visibly wrestle his panic into submission, which was quite an impressive feat, if he was being honest.

“I hear you’ve lost your Relic,” he said simply.

Claude pursed his lips. “It was stolen.”

Lorenz stepped forward, trying to figure out which was the best angle he could approach from. “I also hear you’ve been running around all morning, apparently. So much for being subtle.”

Claude frowned. “I—”

“You shouldn’t be running around,” Lorenz scolded. “You’re not well.”

Not waiting for Claude to protest, Lorenz used the element of surprise of shove the young duke into one of the chairs. The purple lining told him it was Ordelia’s, but that was beside the point. Hilda giggled.

Lorenz leaned down and grabbed Claude’s chin. “Open your mouth,” he said.

_“Excuse me?”_

“I need to check to see if you’ve reopened any lacerations,” Lorenz explained. “I’m not doing this because I want to. I’m doing this because you’re an idiot.”

Hilda snorted and Claude relented. He opened his mouth and Lorenz peered at the sides of his mouth. They were scabbed over from earlier healing, but fresh blood dotted his teeth, indicating deeper wounds in the throat.

“You reopened them,” he said, letting go. Claude rubbed his jaw. “I need to heal these again.”

He placed a hand on Claude’s chest and let his healing magic flow throw the layers of fabric and skin. He felt the hooks and feelers of it probe his lungs. He felt them—the cuts—still so numerous. The healing magic sunk deep into them.

Claude coughed.

As much as Lorenz had just spent the morning defending Claude, he had to admit he did have a way of making him uniquely angry just by being around. What had that idiot been thinking? Running himself ragged while he bled internally? It was a wonder he wasn’t already dead ten times over from other trivial bullshit.

“Thank you,” Claude said quietly.

Lorenz sank into a free chair. This one was blue for Edmund. Hilda remained seated on the table while Judith stayed lookout on the door.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “But you should have been more careful. I understand you’re stressed but I thought we were trying to be low-key.”

“And we didn’t even _find_ the bow,” Hilda remarked. “We think it’s one of the staff. But they’re probably long gone.”

“Well, if it helps,” Lorenz offered. “I think I know who’s behind the poisoning.”

Claude blinked. “What, who?”

Down to business. “I think it’s Lord Edgar.”

“What?” Claude said, at the same time Hilda said, “Who the fuck is that?”

“He’s one of my father’s constituent lords. A minor lord with territory on the border. Drink this.”

He poured a glass of water from the pitcher left in the hall for meetings. The water was likely old, but Claude needed fluids. He pushed the cup across the table.

The leap to Edgar hadn’t been hard. Not after his father had spelled it all out for him so clearly. Someone taking matters into their own hands? Frustrated at their lack of influence to the point of treachery? Edgar wanted Myrddin ceded, and Gloucester wouldn’t propose it because Claude wouldn’t listen. It would be easy to see cause and effect in that—to see which gold-coloured, earring-wearing roadblock needed to be removed.

“Why Edgar?” Hilda asked.

“He and Acheron are trying to get my father to propose a secession of a portion of Alliance land to the Empire.”

Claude choked on his water. Hilda looked aghast.

“They want to _what?_ ” Claude wheezed.

Lorenz waved a hand. “My father has refused to take on the proposal. But apparently he’s been shooting it down for months at least partially on the basis you wouldn’t go for it.”

Claude’s eyes seemed to glimmer. Lorenz could almost see the gears start to turn in his head. “Edgar and Acheron want to roll over at the Empire’s feet and they think I’m the one standing in the way of your father letting them do it?”

“Yes.”

Claude huffed a laugh. “They’re right. I wouldn’t let him.”

A flare of something defensive burned in Lorenz’s chest. “My father would not _roll over_ at the Empire’s–”

“Not _yet_ ,” Claude conceded. “But I’m not blind to the stresses the southern territories are under. We’re… uniquely cozy in the north, aren’t we? In the same way you all are uniquely in danger down there.”

Claude sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He’d brushed it since this morning, and Lorenz took a moment to notice how long it had grown. Long enough that the weight of it had straightened its former curls.

He looked tired; older and grown. They all did.

“But I can’t allow that,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t. All it would succeed in doing would be inviting invasion.”

“That’s your scheme then?” Hilda said. When Claude had the audacity to look confused she rolled her eyes. “Oh _please_ , I know you’ve been planning this since the moment Edelgard started this war.”

Claude tapped his finger on the empty glass. “Okay. Well, neutrality is our only chance at surviving this with our colours intact, so to speak. But I’m not expected to be capable of that, am I?”

He smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes in the slightest.

“I’m an upstart. Cocky like my uncle. Naïve like my mother. Stubborn like my grandfather. I’m not the leader someone from the scared south wants making their decisions with a war on their doorstep. They don’t know me, so, they need to get rid of me. Replace me with someone else.”

Lorenz’s words felt caught in his throat. “If Riegan fell—”

Hilda spoke up suddenly. “Goneril would assume the sovereignty. Wouldn’t we?”

“Goneril can’t,” Claude said with a shake of his head. “The treaty with Almyra bans Goneril sovereignty.”

“ _That_ fucking thing?” Hilda scoffed. “Is that even binding?”

Lorenz was vaguely aware of the treaty, which was struck roughly two decades ago between Duke Oswald and the current king of Almyra. Goneril’s unique position on the Throat and fostered a hatred of their neighbours that ran deep. In the tentative agreements between the two countries Almyra had demanded Goneril be barred from holding leadership of the Alliance while the conflicts on the border raged, lest their sensibilities drag the entire country into a full war. It had been… shaky, to say the least.

Claude’s eyes turned sharp, and he did not pull them away from Lorenz. “The Almyran king will still honour it,” he said with a strange certainty. “Duke Goneril wouldn’t risk another war just to lead Leicester.”

“Gloucester would assume sovereignty,” Lorenz said. Claude nodded.

“And there would be no one in his way if his lords wanted to surrender to Edelgard.” Claude nodded at Lorenz. “Acheron. Do you think he’s in on it? Edgar is proposing the secession but the territory being lost would be Acheron’s.”

Lorenz didn’t have a good answer. The fact Claude was running with his theory was enough of a shock. “I don’t know. Possibly. I can’t see him masterminding it but if he was working with Edgar… yes, maybe.”

“We don’t know for sure so we’ll assume Edgar is acting solo.” Claude closed his eyes and began to lay out the events. “Edgar, on the border, procures Hrym Needlflower. Easy enough with his location.”

“He must’ve waited for the funeral as an opportunity to get close to you,” Hilda proposed, resting her head on her hands. “Who _knows_ how long he’s been planning this.”

Claude nodded. “He didn’t do it himself, though. He wrangled a staff member. Someone who doesn’t like me—though that could honestly be anyone—and gave them the poison. Told them to get Failnaught while we were at dinner.”

There was a knock on the door. Judith peeled herself off the wall and edged the thing open to examine their intruder.

“For you,” she said simply, nodding to Claude. She opened the door to reveal a young woman in servant’s attire. She bustled into the room, looking harried. She bowed low.

“Amélie,” Claude said, brightening slightly. “Have you found Caius yet?”

“Not as of yet, Your Grace,” the woman—Amélie—said. “We’re still looking.”

“Caius?” Lorenz asked. He’d been down in the city, no? Where the staff not aware? He’d said he was on an errand…

“Yeah, he’s the head steward,” Claude explained, misunderstanding his confusion. “If anyone would know about staff absences during dinner it would be him. I sent for him earlier.”

Lorenz cast this gaze between the gathered nobles and Amélie. “Caius is in the city,” he said.

The room fell silent.

"I saw him on my way back from my—"

“What?” Claude got to his feet, his seat clattering to the floor behind him. Amélie yelped.

“D-Duke Riegan?”

Hilda gasped, her bright eyes going wide. “Wait– It was Caius?!”

Claude was pacing again, chewing on his lip with antsy fervour. “He had access,” he muttered. “He _always_ has access. He had access to the kitchen’s and… and the fucking duke’s chambers.”

Judith began to exchange hushed words with Amélie, while Lorenz and Hilda both rise from their seats, skirting the edge of the table to flank Claude. Hilda gripped his arm, halting his pacing.

“He had packages with him,” Lorenz realised. “Goddess… one of them must have been Failnaught. He’s taking them to port.”

Claude nodded. “Caius was close to my grandfather; he’d have known where Failnaught was. Time wouldn’t have been an issue.”

Hilda grabbed Claude’s sleeve, eyes wide. “We saw him, Claude,” she hissed. “He was in the east wing… he gave us blankets when we were waiting outside for Judith!”

“So, he must have taken it before then,” Lorenz reasoned.

“But he was still hanging around...” Hilda countered.

“To see if Claude died or not?”

“To finish the job maybe?”

“Oh, _Goddess_ , what if we had left him alone?”

Claude’s gaze hardened. He turned on his heel to face Judith and Amélie. Lorenz watched the shift happen. In an instant the nervous schemer was gone, replaced by something powerful and commanding and stern.

“Amélie,” he ordered, voice strong and sure. “Get four horses saddled with weapons. Two axes, a bow and three quivers, and—Lorenz. Do you still use lances?”

Lorenz nodded numbly. Claude turned back to the two women.

“A lance, please. Be as quick and quiet as possible.”

Amélie nodded and hurried away. Claude didn’t waste time.

“Judith!” he called, tugging his cape off the chair and back onto his shoulders. “We’re leaving! You need to keep the nobles here when they arrive. _Especially_ Lord Edgar.”

“On it.” Judith was out the door with little complaint. Claude turned to face Hilda.

“Hils, go get your brother and meet us at the stables. We need muscle.”

Hilda rolled her eyes, but Lorenz could tell she was already tensed and reading for action. “Ugh. Fine.” She dashed off, leaving the two men alone.

“Lorenz,” Claude said finally. “Come with me.”

They took off running. Lorenz followed Claude through the quiet side-corridors of the Riegan estate, weaving around more highly trafficked areas to reach the stables undetected.

“Are you with me, Lorenz?” Claude asked suddenly.

“In this?” Lorenz replied. “There is no doubt. Edgar is my father’s ally. It is my duty to apprehend him and his co-conspirators.”

“No—I mean—” Claude sighed and yanked Lorenz to a sudden halt.

Lorenz looked down at him, into those green eyes that saw through everything. They were peering into him now. Looking for _something_.

“Are you _with_ me, Lorenz?”

He looked small like this—like the man of flesh and blood he really was under the bravado. Average height, average build, a pretty face with calm eyes and nervous hands.

“Can I rely on you, from here on out?” He asked. “As Duke Riegan _and_ as Claude? Do I have your trust?”

Names. Unsaid things. Here, Duke Riegan meant _your leader_ and Claude meant _your friend_. Lorenz thought of braids and tea and soot in his mouth and blood on his shirt and guilt. He thought of guilt and he thought of regret. Of mistakes. Of not seeing forests for trees or trees for forests. Of trust. Of alliances. Of tables with no corners.

_It’s our cooperation that sets us apart._

“Of course you do.”

The next smile reached Claude’s eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And I ask you all: If you’re not writing Lorenz a little bit in love with Claude, are you even writing him at all? 
> 
> The butler did it. Sue me. I'm not Agatha Christie. Props to everyone who figured it out!
> 
> Got to include a lot of things I like in this chapter which are, in order: The Gloucesters bullying Acheron, a detailed breakdown of every headcanon I have for how the Alliance works politically, the parents being fun, and more Judith!
> 
> Also because this is the first time he’s mentioned I had quite a time deciding whether or not to have Dimitri be “dead” at this point in the timeline. I decided he would be because a) homeboy too crazy to keep it together longer than a year, and b) killing him a year in gives him primo time to live his best life wandering the woods eating live rats or whatever the fuck he does before he’s given The Most Undignified Off-Screen Death In The History Of Literature. Love that kid. 
> 
> WRITING POLITICAL GARBAGE IS H A R D. I’m sort of trying to piece together how the Alliance gets to the “brink of civil war” state its in when Byleth resurfaces. Here’s a low down of their political situation in 1181/82 if it was hard to follow:
> 
> \- The Roundtable lords each represent a number of constituent minor lords and take proposals and queries on their behalf to present to the Roundtable. Sorta State vs. County. The ones mentioned in this fic (canon or original) are, Riegan: Daphnel and Cornwall. Goneril: Albany. Gloucester: Edgar and Acheron. Ordelia: Burgundy.
> 
> \- Riegan is the “most powerful house” in the Alliance as it has the largest population and most territory, and therefore is the head house of the Alliance. If House Riegan dissolved, power would pass to the next most powerful house.
> 
> \- The current king of Almyra struck an informal treaty with the Alliance stating Goneril cannot become the sovereign house out of worries their position would lead the Alliance to wage all-out war. This treaty is informal, but is still apparently honoured by the Almyrans (according to Claude, but what would HE know about Almyra??).
> 
> \- In order to stay neutral while the Empire invades the Kingdom, the Roundtable is about to enter discussions over introducing trade tariffs on the Kingdom to further distance themselves and keep an unbiased face. Pretty much all the southern lords are in favour of this (being right on the border), but the opinions of the others are yet to be discussed.
> 
> \- Several of the minor southern lords represented by Gloucester (Edgar and Acheron) are pushing him to propose they cede the Alliance territory surrounding Myrddin bridge to the Empire as a show of non-aggression. Gloucester has repeatedly shot down this idea.


	6. Hilda II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the gang go butler hunting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Vibe Check 6: The Checkening](https://open.spotify.com/track/4yyg2J2uXOjCtCyT64984C?si=NrVWuTctS4qi6Swv6UeE4w)
> 
> I attempt to write game-accurate combat despite not having physically touched a copy of Three Houses since February. Parkour. Please send help. 
> 
> Some kinda nasty shit gets said about Claude in this chapter, so just a warning on that if it's not your cup of tea.

Hilda Valentine Goneril, as a rule, did not run unless it was a matter of life and death. Indeed, she ran so little that her classmates had made up a saying for it:

_If you see someone running, get out of their way. If you see Hilda running, you’d better start running too._

She ran now, tearing through the halls like a woman possessed. She was only vaguely aware of people giving her a wide berth before she was at her brother’s door, banging a fist into the dark wood.

Holst yanked the door open a few seconds later, half-dressed and bleary-eyed. “Hilda, what the–”

“You know how I didn’t come back last night, and I told you I had food poisoning?” He nodded, she continued, “I lied. I was helping Claude because someone tried to kill him, and we just found out who it was and we need your help to stop him before everything gets completely fucked.”

Holst could be… difficult. He was a teasing, overbearing brother. He had a soft heart, Hilda knew, that many might chide him for. He had a love for liquor and loud entertainment that those older than him might call unbefitting of his more serious station. But he held that station for a reason; under everything, Holst was a feared, decorated general.

Above all, Holst was a man of action, and Hilda watched the amusement fall from his eyes and turn to hard, pinpoint focus in a split second.

“Explain more on the way,” he says, swiftly finishing getting dressed. He grabbed his cloak off the door. “Let’s go.”

She filled him in on the way to the stables, weaving the tale of last night’s terror as best she could without succumbing to the emotion of it.

Holst grit his teeth. “I’m pissed off he didn’t come to me first.”

Hilda felt oddly defensive. “He came to me,” she countered. “Was that not enough?”

“Apparently _not_. It sounds like you wouldn’t have found him in time if you hadn’t decided to drag Lorenz along,” Holst said, biting his lip. “Claude is a smart man but he’s _far_ more distrusting than Oswald was, and he was _known_ for it. That almost got him killed last night.”

“He has reasons, Holst, I’m sure he does.” The words were already empty before she said them, she knew her brother was right.

Holst shook his head. “Do you believe that? Or are you just trying to make yourself feel better?”

“Just…” Hilda sighed, not wanting to discuss this now. Not now. There were other things to see to. “I’ll talk to him.”

By the time they got to the stables, Lorenz and Claude were already saddled.

“Good morning, Claude,” Holst greeted, taking the reins of a large mare from an attendant. “Lovely day for a funeral.”

“Lovely day for butler-hunting,” Claude corrected. “I assume Hilda filled you in?”

Hilda was in the middle of mounting her own horse, but she answered anyway.

“Yup,” she assured, hiking up her skirts to swing her leg over the mare. “Gave him the whole story. I made sure to make you a real _tragic hero,_ Claude.”

“Oh! Thank you very much, milady!”

They got tacked up and set off in record time, and Hilda was pleased to see that the sun was still relatively low in the sky. They tore off down the hill towards to city together, but Holst and Lorenz quickly rode ahead to notify the dock workers.

Holst and Lorenz split off, galloping down through the wide streets as break-neck speed. Hilda took the moment to sidle her horse up to Claude’s side. He looked at her with a questioning gaze.

Hilda met his eye. “If this turns into a proper fight, I want you to stay back, okay?”

“I always stay back,” he said with a short laugh. “That’s sort of my thing.”

“I mean _farther_ back, dummy,” she rolled her eyes. “You’re still hurt and—no don’t make that face—what was the point of me carrying your ass up two flights of stairs last night if you’re just planning on dying today?”

“I’m not planning on dying.”

“Then stay back.”

If someone had told Hilda upon her first meeting with Claude von Riegan that he would eventually become one of the most important people in her life—a best friend and confidant—she would have laughed in their face.

They’d first met in the summer, just after he’d been announced as the new Riegan heir. The decision had made ripples through the Leicester aristocracy but Goneril’s tight ties to Riegan meant most any gossip surrounding the new lordling—pulled from the ether as he was—was for the most part either positive or of only middling interest.

Hilda, who wasn’t one to bother herself with middling things, had largely ignored any talk of him.

He’d approached her at the Goneril estate during a visit with his grandfather, casting a long shadow over her as she lay sewing in the gardens. She had been there to avoid the Riegan delegation, and it had been down to her own stupidity that she hadn’t made the connection between this new stranger and the guests she’d heard were coming.

“You’re blocking my sun,” she’d said.

“Deepest apologies, milady,” he’d said with no hint of sincerity, grin blinding like the light he’d been blocking. “I wasn’t aware one could own the sun. It must be quite a lot of work.”

It had thrown her off-kilter, to hear someone talk to her with such snap and ease to their words. She thought herself quite smart, but there weren’t often people in her circle who could keep up with her.

“It is indeed,” she’d said, closing her eyes. “I outsource most of my duties, though. It does no good for a lady to exert herself.”

Hilda was usually quite good at sniffing out useful boys to make even more useful, but her error upon meeting Claude had been mistaking him for anything _but_ useful—interested only in the witty way he continued to speak to her and not the Riegan golds and greens he was draped in or the crescent moon decals on the buttons of his coat that, in retrospect, had so obviously shown his status.

To be fair he hadn’t given her his name. If she had known who he was from the beginning she could have maybe laid on the charm—though after getting to know him, she’s not so sure her usual tactics would have worked.

Regardless, she’d blown any chance of wrapping the Riegan heir around her finger in their first conversation. She’d been too off-guard—too immersed in the game of verbal catch between them—to hold herself together.

“I’m Claude von Riegan,” he’d said.

“Bullshit,” she’d replied. He’d laughed in her face.

They’d met for the second time just under a year later, when Hilda had strolled into Garreg Mach carrying none of her own bags.

He’d leaned against the door to the classroom, grin as blinding as it had been the first time. He’d called her ‘sunshine’ and she’d called him ‘bullshitter’ and they’d both vowed to never use those names again. It had been nice, though, to have footing with him from the beginning. 

Back in the present, while the sounds of the city flew past them as they rode, Hilda looked over at a Claude once more lit by the sun.

“Last night… I realised what it would be like if I lost you,” she said miserably, “and Claude? It was _unbearable_. I never want to go through something like that again.”

Blood and shaking and _oh how light in her arms he had been_. It was terrible to think back on. The memories dug claws into her chest. She must have looked miserable because Claude said:

“I’m sorry, Hilda.”

She sighed. “Don’t be sorry, just… just believe in us a little, okay?”

Hilda had never consciously made the decision to follow Claude von Riegan to the ends of the earth. Usually the decisions she made were very careful, especially ones that involved her doing work. But this one had come as a realisation after the fact. It had snuck up on her. And it was _entirely_ unexpected.

Hilda had only ever agreed with Felix Fraldarius on one thing, though he’d always been a bit more loud and mean about it than her. That didn’t change her agreement, though—it was that distaste for needless chivalry, for honourable deaths and dedication to causes that asked you to throw your life away for them, that she shared with him—because Hilda couldn’t fathom caring enough about something to be willing to die for it. 

Claude, on the other hand, cared approximately too much about just about everything. It had become obvious to the Deer that, though he tried to hide it behind an aura of aloofness and calm, his heart was a big and bleeding one.

She’d realised after the Battle of Eagle and Lion, at the feast Claude had spearheaded. It seemed an odd gesture, maybe, for the leaders who had just fought a three-way battle to organise a feast of unity.

He’d smiled, warm but not blinding, and _isn’t it great,_ he’d asked, _don’t you wish every day could be like this?_ When she’d asked if he meant the fighting he’d laughed.

“No, just… togetherness…” he’d said wistfully. “Everyone side by side rather than at the ends of each other’s swords? Seems nicer this way.”

‘Bleeding-heart idealist’ was not anyone’s first description of Claude, nor their second or third, but Hilda had known him long enough to see the heart of the matter.

He had ambitions bigger than himself, bigger than the Golden Deer, bigger than the four corners of Fódlan. He reached towards those ambitions with arms outstretched, his bleeding-heart spilling over all the while. And he gathered a herd to walk with him, but never once did he ask them to be there to catch him if he fell.

Claude had never asked Hilda to give something as great as her whole self—as her life—to his goals or to him, and perhaps it was for that reason that Hilda thought it might be a thing worth doing. A decision worth making. He never asked her to be there, but he didn’t _need_ to ask.

They reached the docks quickly, with Holst and Lorenz already visible ahead talking to a pair of guards. Hilda lowered her voice as they slowed to a canter. 

“If it comes down to killing Caius, I’m doing it,” she said.

Claude tutted. “Hilda, I’m not an _invalid_. He’s my grandfather’s steward so he’s _my_ responsibility.”

“And you’re mine,” she said simply.

Hilda was not and never had been Claude’s retainer, though most people at the Officer’s Academy had assumed she was.

She wasn’t his retainer in name because they hadn’t wanted to put a name to their thing. They hadn’t really known what it was, though the answer was of course obvious; Hilda, who’d grown up with too many superficial friends, and Claude, who’d grown up without any at all, were _friends_. Their relationship was one of equals—a balanced thing of freely-given loyalties unlike Dedue and Hubert’s devotion to their lieges.

She wasn’t by his side just because he asked her to be, and that made all the difference.

“Everything’s a mess,” she said. “I get it, okay. You’re not used to having to ask for help, are you? That’s okay, but you don’t have to be like that all the time.”

They stopped and Hilda dismounted, tugging the silver axe out of the saddle as she did. She circled around and offered an arm to her companion—her not-liege, her _friend_ —which he took after only a moment’s hesitation.

His feet hit the cobblestones, and he looked down at her with eyes like chipped bottle-glass, almost comically wide.

“I’m sorry if I’ve made you feel like I don’t trust you, Hilda,” he said. “I do… I swear, I just… I’ve never…”

“You don’t need to worry, Claude.” She shot him a grin. “Even if you have no one else you’ll have me. I promise.”

He surprised her by laughing. It was as unexpected as it was genuine.

“You know,” he said, “you’re the second person to ever say that to me.”

“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow. “Who was the first? Do I need to go break their arms to assert my dominance?”

“It was my mother.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t break her arm, please.”

“I’m not gonna break your mom’s arm.”

He laughed again.

“Shut up,” she mumbled, unable to keep the smile from her voice.

“Hello!?” Lorenz called, beckoning them over with a huff. “If you two are done chatting we have an assassin to apprehend!”

Claude rolled his eyes as they approached, fastening the last of his quivers to his hip. “Just announce it to the whole port, Lorenz…”

Holst nodded to the soldiers they were talking to, who ran off down the docks, and turned back to the group. “While I think we should be a _bit_ stealthy,” he reported, “no ships have left since Lorenz saw Caius, so if he really is leaving this way he’ll still be here. They’re going to lock down the docks fully, so all we have to do is sniff the bastard out.”

“We have to be careful,” Claude said with a grim edge to his voice. “He has Failnaught. If he tries to use it we could be in trouble.”

“Hilda,” Holst said. “You mentioned beasts, like Gautier’s eldest, right?”

“Miklan,” Lorenz supplied. “We fought him at the Academy. They’re formidable creatures but as long as Caius doesn’t actually _use_ Failnaught we should be in the clear.”

“As far as I can reason he won’t use it,” Claude continued. “He probably already has it packed away for shipment somewhere if he’s really intending to get it out of the city. But we should be careful.”

Claude looked pensive for a moment before nodding to himself. “We should split into pairs to cover more ground. Lorenz and I can go separate ways and we can send signals to each other if we run into him.”

“Sounds good,” Holst nodded. “Where are we going?”

“I’ll take either Hilda or you, Holst. Lorenz and I work best at range, so if we get jumped, we’ll want someone with each of us who can hold close-range.”

Holst laid a hand on Hilda’s shoulder. “As much as I loathe to part from you, dearest sister, I’m afraid I’d prefer to accompany our dear Duke Riegan.”

Hilda slapped his hand off and rolled her eyes.

“ _Guh,_ don’t be embarrassing.”

As much as she wanted to protest, she knew Claude would be safe with Holst. Plus, she wasn’t sure her brother didn’t have an alternate motive for trying to snag the duke alone, and if Holst was set on cornering him into a patented ‘Big Brother Talk’ even _she_ probably couldn’t dissuade him.

“It’s my job to be embarrassing,” he said simply.

Hilda rolled her eyes. “Let’s get going, _brother dear_.”

He laughed and ruffled her hair. She shook him off but shot him a _be careful_ glance all the same as they parted.

She really hoped today wouldn’t end as badly as yesterday.

The two groups decided to start at opposite ends of the docks and work towards the middle. The port was being closed at all entrances, but there were still workers milling about. As they walked, Hilda kept an eye out for Caius or anyone else shifty, while Lorenz spearheaded the question-asking.

They walked for a good half an hour, making absolutely no headway, when Hilda was overcome by the need to fill the silence.

“Lorenz… I never properly thanked you,” she said.

“Whatever for?” Lorenz asked, frowning.

“For coming with me last night,” Hilda said, “and for staying. I’ll admit I didn’t actually know if you _cared_.”

Lorenz huffed a laugh. “No, that’s… that’s fair. I’ve come to realise that I’m not very adept at showing others I care for them. I have been… very foul, in the past.”

“No, you’re… you’re a good friend, Lorenz,” Hilda said, though she knew what he was saying was harsh if somewhat true.

He looked sad. “No, I… I feel there have been many times in the past I could have been a better one.”

Hilda shook her head. “That doesn’t matter now. What matters is that you’re here, and you stayed. It means a lot.”

“Of course, I stayed,” Lorenz said softly. “You two are good friends, too.”

Hilda smiled, and then paused. In the corner of her eye, something caught her attention.

The ship was a modestly sized brig, with tall masts and square sails flapping in the morning sea-breezes. It sat on the end of one of the docks, tucked away and unassuming. What really struck Hilda about it, though, was the dark purple flag flying from the front mast.

She grabbed Lorenz by the arm. “Are you getting bad vibes off that? Or is it just me?”

“It seems a bit… _on the nose_ , doesn’t it?” Lorenz cocked his head. “With the…”

“The eagle flag? Yeah, it’s pretty suspicious.”

“How would it have gotten here? You’re thinking it’s Empire aligned?”

Hilda shrugged. “Smuggled in? I dunno.”

Lorenz pursed his lips. “I would think security here would be tighter, even _if_ we’re staying neutral.”

“Derdriu has the biggest commercial port in Fódlan, why else do you think it’s taken us so long to walk nowhere at all in here?” Hilda moved up and craned her neck around a stack of boxes, trying to assess who was coming and going from the vessel. She couldn’t see anyone. “I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to sneak a plain-looking ship inside if you tried.”

“That’s some interesting trivia, Hilda,” Lorenz mused. “I didn’t know you knew so much about Leicester trade.”

Hilda rolled her eyes. “I _can_ read, Lorenz.”

“I don’t doubt it—Oh, wait a moment!”

Hilda jerked her head to face Lorenz, who was pointing around the other side of their pile of crates and had just dropped his voice to a whisper. A man was loading boxes up the gangplank of the neighbouring ship, whistling to himself. He didn’t seem to have noticed their approach.

“We should ask him if he’s seen anything,” Lorenz proposed.

“We can’t just ask _everyone_ ,” Hilda whined under her breath. “This is so _tiring_.”

“He’s wearing the colours of the ship he’s loading up,” Lorenz observed. “He probably works on it, which means he’s probably been here all morning. If that ship is suspicious, he might’ve seen something that can help us.”

Hilda blinked. “Oh that’s… actually reasonable.”

“Don’t sound surprised.”

They ducked out from behind the crates and walked over as casually as they could.

“Excuse me, sir,” Lorenz waved down the dockworker, who paused still holding a crate. “We’re looking for a man—a steward of House Riegan. We believe he may have come this way with a cart, perhaps some large packages?”

“Lotsa men coming in and out today, milord,” the man said, putting the crate down. He was a gruff sailor type, with the beard and bandana and everything. He actually reminded Hilda a little of Professor Byleth’s father, in terms of raw… width.

“We’re just looking for one man,” Lorenz said. “About mid-fifties? Dark hair with a fair amount of grey… a few scars, I believe.”

“This about them soldiers closing the port up just now?” The man raised an eyebrow. He seemed to be taking the two of them in, with their funeral dress and relatively cleaner clothes. “You two merchant kids or something? If this is about legal matters I ain’t speakin’ without a warrant.”

Uh-oh, Lorenz’s haughty noble act wasn’t working. Hilda was going to have to step in.

“Oh, it’s nothing like that!” She chirped, pasting on her most charming smile. She sidestepped Lorenz to catch the man’s attention, a vision in pink and black and ceremonial armour. “We’re just finishing preparations for Duke Oswald’s ceremonies today on behalf of the Riegan estate. Our dear head steward Caius was picking up some important supplies, but he hasn’t yet returned, so we’ve come to see if he’s faring well.”

She batted her eyelashes, maybe a bit too much. The man’s eyes widened.

_Hook. Line…_

“The Duke’s poor grandson… Claude von Riegan, you are aware of him? Ascending so young is tragic, isn’t it? He’s a quite good friend of ours, you see, and he’s been _ever so_ torn organising this funeral. Isn’t that right, Lorenz? It breaks my heart to see him so, and Caius was being _so_ kind in picking up supplies for him so he’d have time to grieve… Anything to help us make this day go smoothly would be such a help, good sir, you’d be doing your city such a service. I’m Hilda Valentine Goneril, by the way.”

She held out her hand, a little limply. It didn’t matter if he kissed it, shook it, or did nothing with it; she was establishing status all the same.

A blush dusted the man’s already ruddy cheeks.

_Aaaaand, Sinker._

“Oh, Lady Goneril, apologies if I was being rude…” he bowed shortly and took her had a little awkwardly, shaking it like he didn’t quite know if it was the right thing to do. “Yes, I saw a man enter that there ship a while ago with some packages.”

“Did he leave?” Lorenz asked.

“No milord, I ain’t seen him, at least.”

Hilda beamed. “Thank you _so_ much.”

“It’s not a problem, milady,” he said. “Please give my sympathies to the young duke, if you can.”

They thanked him with a bow and curtsey and two “Goddess bless you”s and crept down to the end of the dock.

“Should I signal Claude and Holst?” Lorenz asked.

“Not yet,” Hilda said. “We’ll confirm it first.”

They picked their way up the gangplank, as silently as possible. Hilda took point, gripping her axe tightly in both hands, eyes skirting the upper deck for signs of life.

There were none. The ship—oddly—was as still as the night. No one seemed to be on board, at least not on the top deck. Hilda let her stance relax a little.

“We’re clear up here,” she reported, and Lorenz clambered the rest of the way up onto the deck.

“Should we head inside?” he asked. Hilda thought about it.

“Sure, but let’s stay together.”

They began to explore the decks of the ship, surprised to find that the entire place appeared to be deserted. There wasn’t much on the thing at all, but they still searched every corner they could. No passengers, no staff, no nothing.

They were beginning to think this had been a waste of time when they came to the lower decks. A cargo hold was tucked back at the stern of the ship, and it only took a few rams from Hilda to wedge its rusty hinges loose.

Lorenz lit a lantern, spilling warm light over a collection of crates and packages—all stamped with the Riegan seal. The duo shared a glance.

“Jackpot,” Hilda grinned.

They dug through the boxes. Most were full of travelling supplies, likely for Caius’s grand getaway, but others were packed with letters and papers that were of little interest to Hilda but looked to be correspondence between Oswald and other nobles. Mail theft? Interesting.

She pried the top off the last crate.

“Oh,” Hilda gasped. “It’s… It wasn’t _just_ Failnaught.”

She nodded to Lorenz, who peered into the box.

“Oh… Goddess above,” he breathed.

The box was full of valuables, lockboxes, and ledgers, all bearing the crest of Riegan. They were obviously valuable and had to have been stolen from the same study. The sheer number of them made Hilda wonder if Caius had started smuggling them out of the house earlier than last night…

One piece of parchment caught her eye, tucked into the lid of the crate like a label. She picked it up and unfolded it.

_ATTN: HvV_

_Will make landfall 29 HRP MOON. Transport through DA to same RIVER ROUTE in EDA from GT MOON. FN in convoy._

“What’s this… ‘D-A’… ‘E-D-A’…?”

Lorenz leaned in closer. “That’s the shorthand we sometimes use for missives,” he explained. “Normally it’s the first two letter of the family name, like D-A for Daphnel or G-O for Goneril, but for Edmund and Edgar they differentiate by adding an A for Airmid. Edgar is E-D-A.”

Hilda gripped the paper tighter. “So, this is proof that Edgar was involved?”

“As good as we’ll likely get,” Lorenz agreed. “It’s at least proof that they’re using his territory to smuggle things over the border.”

“This says it’s ‘for the attention of HvV’,” Hilda continued, tapping the letter. “Who’s ‘HvV’?”

Lorenz peered at the parchment and then let out a sigh. “I’d guess Hubert von Vestra. If we’re right about the timeline of events, he was probably the one that provided Edgar and Caius with the means to pull this off. It makes sense.”

“Oh.” Hilda tucked the letter down her bodice. Lorenz winced at the motion, but she ignored him. “I honestly can’t say that’s surprising. But it’s almost… anticlimactic.”

“However so?”

“Hubert was… _obviously_ slimy. Of course _he’d_ be the one to set up assassinations of Edelgard’s political rivals. I’m pretty sure he sleeps in a coffin.”

“Hubert being a vampire, if anything, makes the story _more_ interesting,” Lorenz said with a smirk, and Hilda grinned. Oh, he’d become so much more fun after learning to play along.

“Sure, but imagine if it had been someone unassuming like Ferdinand?” Hilda mused. “Or imagine if it _hadn’t_ been someone from the Empire? Like the King of Almyra cutting down our succession in a moment of opportune weakness? Or Dimitri!? That’s _way_ juicier.”

“Wait, Dimitri? Why Dimitri?” Lorenz made a face. “Isn’t he dead?”

“I mean _yeah._ But imagine if he wasn’t!” Hilda mused. “That would be very exciting, admit it.”

“And unlikely,” Lorenz countered. “Why would he try to kill Claude?”

“I don’t know, I’m just throwing out ideas here.”

“This is very poor taste. I don’t think we should be joking about dead classmates.”

Hilda tutted. “Comedy is tragedy plus time!”

“Okay, well, _no_. And that aside—” Lorenz got to his feet, “—We’d better signal for the others. Failnaught isn’t here.”

“No, it isn’t. Very astute, Lord Gloucester.”

The new, unfamiliar voice shattered all the humour in the room in an instant. Hilda and Lorenz spun around as quickly as they could, Lorenz brandishing his lance and Hilda gripping her axe tight.

Caius, dressed in simple clothes and a dark cloak, stood in the doorway. He wore a humourless grin on his face, and he was pointing a bow at them.

Not just any bow, either.

Hilda found her voice first. “Caius… Caius, you need to put Failnaught down… now.”

Hilda had held Freikugel enough to know the rhythm of a relic, and judging by the way Lorenz stiffened beside her, perhaps he knew the feeling too.

The relics were fuelled by crests, and while their native crest was always the most effective—unlocking it like a single key perfected for a single lock—any crest could jimmy that lock open, so to speak, and the relics seemed to _hunger_ to be opened.

Hilda could feel it now, the ebb of Failnaught as it all but squirmed in Caius’s hands. The crest stone didn’t glow; it found no purchase in Caius’s blood. But the presence of two crest-bearers in the room, as non-compatible as they were, was making the pitiful thing stir. Hilda could feel it reaching for her, those ivory arms, power pounding within the monstrous thing in time with her heartbeat.

It was awful. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

“I suppose the game is up, is it not?” Caius drawled, ignoring the two nobles’ shifts in demeanour. “A shame. We were just getting to the good part.”

“Caius, _please_ , you have to let the bow go,” Hilda didn’t know why she was begging so hard. “It’s too dangerous.”

Caius ignored her. “Tell me, Lady Goneril, is Claude yet living? I’d wondered as to why I hadn’t heard your cries last night or this morning. Though I suppose the mutt’s secrecy knows so few bounds I hoped perhaps his passing had been kept quiet.”

The statement struck Hilda like an arrow, tossing any concern aside. “What the _fuck_ did you just call him?”

Caius laughed, and Lorenz stepped in. Caius pulled the string back farther, aiming his knocked arrow at Hilda. “Try anything and I shoot.”

“He lives,” Lorenz said in a cold tone, raising his hands in surrender. “He awaits the return of his property, Caius. Perhaps you’d be so kind as to hand it over?”

“I don’t think I shall, Lord Gloucester,” Caius snarled. “It’s a pity you are so fond of allying yourself with filth. I often think your father is the only one with sense at that table anymore. I wonder what he’d think of you now?”

Lorenz grit his teeth. “You should watch your tongue… this is _treason_.”

“Are you even hearing yourself?” Hilda hissed. “You’re crazy! You poisoned the leader of the Leicester Alliance, you moron! How do you expect to walk away from this in one piece?”

“What happens to me doesn’t matter,” Caius said. “I did what I did.”

“And you’re going to answer for it!”

Caius ignored her words but kept Failnaught trained on her chest. “Don’t you know what he _is?_ ”

“Claude? Uh, yeah.” Hilda scoffed. _He’s my friend_. “He’s our duke, idiot. He’s _your_ duke.”

Caius laughed without humour. “He’s not _my_ duke,” he spat. “Oswald was my duke. I’d never serve a _mongrel_ , even one that just so happens to share his blood.”

Hilda tightened her grip on the axe, willing herself to stay calm. Mutt. Filth. Mongrel. The words weren’t even directed at her, but they stung like seawater in an open wound, like needles in the skin.

The steward wasn’t done, apparently. “All you nobles care about is your _blood_ —succession and crests and relics—you’d sit by and let foreign poison into your homes, into the highest seat of power in your nation? Just because this bow fits in his palm? Just because you can tell yourself he looks enough like you to be trusted? How _foolish_ we are to let you lead us.”

 _Oh._ That’s what this was about.

There were things Hilda suspected about Claude, sure. He wasn’t nearly as slick as he thought he was and there was only so much words could mask from what eyes could see. But she had no interest in substantiating such things. It was odd, maybe, for a daughter of Goneril to not care about that, but Hilda was not who she once was. She didn’t give a shit about tiring crap like politics or borders or stuffy unions of nobles. Not really. There were better things to care about—to throw weight and time behind—and for Hilda, those things were _people_.

People like Claude, who walked lonely roads without ever asking for help. People like Marianne and Lysithea, who held burdens close to their hearts. People like Leonie, Raphael, and Ignatz, who would be the hardest hit by the ravages of war. People like Cyril, hurt by her family’s legacy in ways she had to learn about after the fact. Even people like Lorenz, as much trapped by responsibility as they were empowered by it.

They were _hers_ —her _people_ and her _responsibility_ —and she wasn’t about to let a crusty old man tell her what to think of any of them.

“If you don’t come back with us willingly,” Hilda hissed, “I’m perfectly happy to break your legs and drag you.”

“You’re a _traitor_ , Caius,” Lorenz said, and Hilda ignored the side eye he gave her. “You’ll be punished for this. I swear it. We know you were aided by my father’s constituents.”

“You want me to _confess?_ You really are fools,” Caius laughed. “It makes sense… as content as you are to entrust this country to a child who will bring us to ruin, you clearly aren’t intelligent.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hilda spat. “Maybe if any of you _jackasses_ would sit down and listen to him, you’d know that’s the _opposite_ of what he wants.”

“Duke Oswald would have known to surrender to the Empire, for the sake of his people. Needless arguing will only prolong suffering.”

“Duke Oswald put Claude in charge because he trusted him,” Hilda snarled. “And if you can’t get that through your stupid head, I guess I’m just gonna have to do it for you.”

“Bold of you to think I’m letting either of you off this ship alive.”

Hilda lunged to the side as Caius loosed the arrow, rolling sharply into Lorenz and knocking the two of them to the ground. The arrow flew overhead, piercing into the wall.

“Caius, don’t!”

But he wasn’t listening. He drew back again, and that’s when hell broke loose.

Darkness burst and boiled from the bow in Caius’s hands. It was the screaming frustrations of a living weapon given form, rioting against the hold of a man whose blood had not earned its favour. In an instant Caius was consumed, ripping and tearing at seams Hilda hadn’t know a person could have, bursting in grotesque, aching waves of malice and pain. He screamed, the sound turning more horrid and inhuman with every inhale of rotting, twisting lungs.

Lorenz grabbed Hilda by the arm and yanked her unceremoniously to the side of the room, just in time as the still-forming beast tumbled forward out of the doorway. The exit path was free, but it was all the two nobles could do to watch the transformation continue. Legs and arms turned to rippling, writhing claws and the raised haunches of a predator. Horns and spines burst from the tensing, whipping spine of the creature as it grew larger and larger, filling the small underdeck room to the ceiling.

It screamed, and this time it was a roar.

Without warning, Lorenz _threw_ Hilda out of the room into the narrow hall. It was maybe the most un-noble action she’d ever seen him make but she wasn’t complaining.

“We’re running!” He shouted, tearing up the stairs with a vice-grip on her hand. “We can’t fight it two on one!”

They burst out into the sunlit top deck, and Hilda stumbled out of Lorenz’s grasp, blinking in the light. The muffled cries of the beast sounded from underfoot, and Lorenz’s dark eyes met hers in a flash. He nodded, and they ran.

Hilda hit the railing hard and her ensuing shout was so full-bodied she almost fell overboard.

“SOUND THE ALARMS!” She screamed, unsure if anyone would even be able to hear her.

Lorenz shot a fireball into the air. It exploded in the morning sky like a firework.

The ship rocked under them, and the port side keeled hard into the dock, almost throwing Hilda and Lorenz from the side. Hilda gripped tight onto the railing and felt the rumble through the wood as the beast beneath their feet tore through the decks below.

“We have to get off the ship,” Lorenz reasoned, and Hilda nodded. The duo dashed towards the gangplank, only to find it knocked loose by the earlier jolting. Hilda swore.

“Okay. We’re jumping,” she said, making an executive decision. Lorenz whirled on her, aghast.

“What?! No!” he cried. “It’s too high!”

“Don’t be a baby! It’s this or die!”

As if illustrating her point, the ground behind them splintered and, in a geyser of broken wood and debris, the beast burst onto the top deck. The ship lurched again, and Hilda grabbed Lorenz by the arm to stop him falling overboard as the ship drove harder into the dock. The grating sound was deafening, and the masts above them began to creak and groan.

The beast roared, training its devilish eyes on the pair.

“Okay,” Lorenz squeaked. “After you, Hilda!”

Hilda didn’t have to be told twice. She vaulted the railing in one motion, clutching her axe tight and dropping into a roll as she hit the dock below. She stumbled to her feet and called up to Lorenz.

“Alright! I’ll catch you!”

“What!?”

“Jump!”

Hilda dropped her axe just in time to be met with an armful of Lorenz as he dove off the ship. She was strong, sure, but he was also much taller than her, and the size difference knocked her off her feet, sending the two of them crashing to the ground.

“Goddess, Hilda, I’m so sorry!” Lorenz wailed, pulling back and looking very much like he was about to start tearing up. She pounded him on the shoulder and hauled them both to their feet.

“Don’t worry about it, let’s get moving.”

They broke into a run and felt, rather than heard, the beast leap onto the dock to follow them. The wooden planks rattled and groaned at their backs, but they didn’t dare turn around.

Somewhere in the distance, the dock’s alarm bells started sounding.

Hilda could feel her blood pumping and lungs straining as she sprinted through the rows of ships. She cast only small glances at Lorenz beside her to make sure he was still following, but otherwise stared straight ahead.

The beast roared in the distance, coming ever closer.

They turned a corner in the winding maze of ships and ran straight into Claude and Holst, weapons drawn and tensed for a fight.

Holst immediately grabbed Hilda by the shoulder, looking her up and down. “Hilda! Are you okay?”

“I’m okay! But Caius! He—”

The beast roared, and all four nobles went wide eyed as the hulking, black monstrosity appeared around the corner, knocking one of the nearby ships back from its mooring.

“SCATTER!” Claude yelled, and they all dashed out of the way as the beast came barrelling between them, carried by its own momentum.

Hilda grabbed Claude and tugged him behind her. They pressed up to the edge of the dock, half on the gangplank of a nearby ship. Hilda stayed her ground and Claude drifted backwards, stalking up the gangplank to get higher ground. Hilda watched the beast roar at Holst and Lorenz, who battered it with a slash to the leg and a fireball to the shoulder respectively.

“Hey, Hils,” Claude said, and she turned to see him knocking an arrow with a glimmer in his eyes. “Remember the Gloucester merchants? With Ig and Raph?”

She did. They’d fought summoned beasts together, smaller than this one but still formidable. They’d—

“Oh!”

Claude grinned. She matched the expression.

“You’ve got it, boss!” She called, and then she was running.

It had been so long since Hilda had actually been in a _real_ fight, but the familiar adrenaline came bursting back in her veins the second Claude’s arrow was loosed. She tore forward, only vaguely aware of her brother doing the same, and raised her axe to strike.

The beast slashed out at her as she approached, but its swing went wide as it was knocked back by a burst of flame along its flank. Hilda mentally thanked Lorenz and then ducked, sliding under the beast’s belly.

Obviously, Holst hadn’t been expecting it, because she heard him shout, but she was already following through. She swung her axe up as she slid, tearing a long gash in the beast’s underbelly. The beast’s barrier stuttered for a moment, and she heard its howls of pain as she shot out the other side, clambering to her feet behind it.

They had pulled that move in Gloucester territory, defending merchants from beasts on the road in their academy days. Claude drawing attention and Lorenz firing burning magic into its side while Hilda got close enough to drive a strike into the beast’s weak spot.

Hilda cheered, but her celebration was short lived. The beast turned around, and she needed to focus.

Drawing a beast’s attention was a valuable thing, though also incredibly dangerous. They were slow, so getting them to move in directions that you could take advantage of was key. Hilda had never once been in charge of strategy but being on the front lines gave you a unique feel for those kinds of manoeuvres.

“Hey there,” she drawled, flipping her axe in her hands, and tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Wanna dance, big boy?”

The beast roared. She was going to take that as a yes.

The most important thing to keep in mind when fighting a beast was how tough they were. Their physical armour was almost magically reinforced, so breaking it was the only way to truly make the thing vulnerable. Hilda had taken a good chunk out of this one, but they still had a ways to go. A few more precise hits could bring it down but finding those chinks in its armour would need doing.

The beast took a step towards her.

Then another.

And then Holst was on top of it—driving his axe down into its skull.

The beast roared and Hilda heard and saw the crack of its rippling barrier as it faltered once again. Holst leapt down, catching a swipe to his shoulder as he did. He stumbled to Hilda’s side.

“Ballsy move there, Hildy,” he said, the nickname making her snort. “Where’d you learn that one?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” She teased.

Lorenz blasted the beast in the face, scorching flames cracking its black skin like breaking coal in a firepit. It roared, and three more arrows pierced its neck in quick succession.

It ran forward and Hilda and Holst split apart to avoid getting hit, but this was where Hilda made her mistake.

In her haste she tripped, spilling onto the ground at the thing’s feet. It roared, its primal creature-brain seeing the shapes of fallen prey in her sprawled form. It reared up on its hind legs above her.

Oh, she thought dumbly, I’m going to die.

But she didn’t die. Instead, a strong hand grabbed her sleeve and hauled her backwards, yanking her onto her feet and sending her out of the beast’s path with a shove.

The person who the hand belong to knocked an arrow.

 _Claude_ had pulled her back, which meant he was close—too close.

“Claude!” Hilda yelled, stumbling back with the momentum of his push.

Claude just winked and then pulled his arm back. He was holding the bow low, drawing the string back to his chest to aim upwards in such close quarters.

He had two—no, was that _three?_ —arrows strung on the bow, and he was aiming them up at the rearing beast.

He loosed and the three pinpricks of light—metal arrowheads glimmering in the low sunlight—pierced the underside of the beast’s head like falling stars. They had sunk in deep, driving through bone with force afforded to them by the close range.

The beast howled and Claude danced back, but not fast enough.

With the force of a whip, the beast spun around and brought its tail up, knocking Claude off his feet and into the water.

Hilda was screaming, she knew that on an intellectual level. She knew, theoretically, that her scream was ripping from her throat and through the air like a knife, but she couldn’t hear it. She just heard blood pounding in her ears. She just saw the red of the beast’s eyes, the fear that glimmered in the sickly irises for just a moment before she drove the blade of her axe into its face and _pushed_ with all the strength in her tiny body.

Black blood and ichor exploded outwards and her blade crunched bone and sinew and veins, splattering across her face and neck and chest. Hilda saw the light leave its eyes, but she kept pushing, pushing until the last of its barrier shattered around her, tearing into her bare forearms like arcane knives.

The beast tore apart. It caked the surrounding area, and its attackers, in wet, black detritus. It smelled of iron and lightning, but mostly death, and it sloughed off the carcass of the thing as it crumpled back into the corpse of Caius. Failnaught hummed just out of his dead grip.

_Failnaught… seeking its owner._

“Claude,” Hilda breathed, rage giving way to fear.

She staggered to the edge of the dock, where Claude had been flung into the sea. She landed hard on her knees at the edge, letting her axe skitter across the ground and out of sight. She peered into the murky water between the dock and the boat, looking for something— _anything_ —to show her a sign of life.

For a second—a split second—she thought he was dead for real, that his already-injured body had been knocked out and he’d sunk to the bottom of Derdriu Harbour to die. Her heart trembled, and the earth started to tilt. But then, like the asshole he was, Claude surfaced, coughed and looked up at her with a smile.

“Hey there, sunshine,” he wheezed. “Mind giving me a hand?”

Hilda yanked him out of the water and onto the dock, fat tears spilling down her cheeks the whole time. She dumped him onto the dock, right in a pile of beast-viscera, as punishment. He lay there for a moment, out of breath and shaking with adrenaline. Hilda smacked him on the shoulder.

“Stop _scaring_ me like that!” She cried, and it really was _crying_.

He laughed, small and true, and the fear lifted from her shoulders. “Sorry.”

“Just—” she sighed, and dropped her head onto his chest, feeling the vibration of his weak laughter. “I told you to stay back, Claude. Why didn’t you listen?”

“Hey, you can’t stop me from wanting to look after my right-hand lady.”

She blinked up at him as he pushed himself into a sitting position, panting slightly. Seawater and his own blood had his hair sticking to his forehead like oil-slick. He looked gross, and so did she, but she didn’t really care.

“The right-hand lady is you, by the way,” he said.

Hilda said nothing. She just reached up and pushed his hair back from his face, cataloguing every inch of what she’d almost lost two days in a row. Claude’s smile faltered.

“Don’t… Don’t throw your life away for me, Claude,” she whispered.

He took her hand and squeezed it.

“Then don’t throw _yours_ away for _me_. We’ll call it even.”

It only took a few minutes for the soldiers to arrive, and in that time Lorenz had managed to patch up the worst of their injuries.

Holst had stopped him from healing the gash on his forehead, as well at the laceration on Claude’s cheek that was busy staining his beard red.

“If it’s not life-threatening, leave it,” he’d said. “If we’re confronting Edgar, we do it looking like this. We let him see the consequences of his actions.”

Holst had ridden off shortly after, heading back to the estate to notify Judith and the other roundtable lords. Hilda wondered what they were going to do about funeral guests, who’d all be gathering soon at the estate. If there was one thing nobles didn’t like it was waiting for things, and it was looking less and less likely that they were going to be able to hold Oswald’s funeral on time.

“Stop moving,” Lorenz admonished. “I’m trying to stop you from bleeding out.”

Hilda sighed. “I won’t bleed out.”

“Not if you let me heal you. Now stop moving.”

Lorenz pressed a hand onto her side, closing the last dregs of a wound she hadn’t even remembered getting. Hilda hissed at the pressure, but its was gone as swiftly as it had come.

“That should do it,” Lorenz said. “Where’s Claude? I need to make sure he doesn’t drop dead on the way back.”

It wasn’t hard to find him. He hadn’t gone far, after all. He was standing only a few yards away. They watched him in silence.

Claude stood over the pool of ichor and blood where Caius’s body had been. He was staring down at it, and for a moment Hilda wondered why. She wondered if she should call out to him, but then he crouched down.

With tentative hands, Claude pulled the gleaming white arms of Failnaught from the refuse. He wiped at it idly, shedding what he could of the black remnants of Caius’s divine punishment from its form. The crest stone, even from this distance, flared in his grasp. He crouched there for a moment, just looking.

Hilda felt the vague tug on her own blood stop as Failnaught’s focus writhed and keened towards its new master. It, like Freikugel all those moons ago, had found its new home.

Perhaps he thought they weren’t looking, and perhaps that was why Claude looked more openly miserable in this moment than Hilda had maybe ever seen him before.

“It’s a heavy burden,” Lorenz mumbled. Hilda gave his shoulder a squeeze as she used it to stand up.

“Are you alright?” She called to Claude as he approached, slinging Failnaught over his shoulder and plastering on a smile.

“Yeah,” he called back, ignoring the obvious subtext in her question. “I think I just need a bottle of wine and an eighteen-hour nap and I’ll be right back to normal.”

Lorenz let out a soft laugh. “We could _all_ benefit from some rest right about now.”

Hilda giggled and Claude stretched. “ _Gods_ ,” he sighed. “That was _too_ crazy. I’ve been to a lot of fun funerals in my day and only about half of them have started with monster fights, and never just after breakfast.”

Lorenz narrowed his eyes. “How bad is it that I sincerely can’t tell if you’re joking.”

Claude smirked. “How exciting do you imagine my life has _been_ , Lorenz?”

“I… I still can’t tell.”

Hilda let their banter fade into the background, and found her eyes falling on the bow.

It seemed… _happy_ … if a bow could be happy, to be on the arm of its rightful owner. The crest stone was glowing now, a shimmering, humming red light emblazoned with a jagged crescent moon. Hilda could almost convince herself the white ivory finish was twitching where Claude’s fingers brushed over it.

She wondered how it felt to Claude, who had looked at it with such hesitation yesterday. She wondered if this was the first time he’d ever touched it—forced to take it up, not having taken it off the wall of his grandfather’s study by choice, but rather picked it out of the rubble of a dead man to prevent further disaster.

“See something you like?” Claude asked. Hilda laughed humourlessly, pulling her gaze from eerie red to tired green.

“No. Not at all. It’s creepy.”

“It sure is,” Claude agreed. “It feels… alive, almost… I don’t want to touch it and yet—”

“It feels like it fits, doesn’t it?” She said softly. “Like you’re meant to be holding it.”

Claude grimaced. “I don’t know if I like it.”

“Me either,” Hilda sighed.

The conversation fell silent, and she felt the sudden urge to change the subject. Fortunately, she remembered the whole reason they were here in the first place.

“Oh! So, we found this letter—” she tugged the piece of parchment, a little ichor-stained, out of her bodice. Lorenz winced again. “Looks like we might be able to pressure Edgar with it, and also it turns out his supplier in the Empire was probably Hubert. Surprise, surprise.”

“Wait, Hubert?” Claude snatched the letter out of her hand and gave it a once-over. He cocked his head, eyebrows knitting together. “That’s kind of anticlimactic…”

“Why do you _both_ think that?” Lorenz muttered.

Hilda giggled.

Lorenz seemed to be fed up. “Regardless, we're not done. What are you going to do now?”

Claude’s voice was quiet and steady as he said, “I’m going to get a wyvern.”

“That’s r—wait, what?”

“Did you see when I, like, shot it underhanded?” He mimed the motion, grinning at a very un-amused Lorenz. “That would look really cool if I did it on a wyvern.”

Hilda snort-laughed. “Okay, sure,” she teased. “But what are you _actually_ going to do?”

“ _We_ ,” he corrected, “are going to go have a chat with our good friend Lord Edgar.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AO3 telling me I'm spelling 'humour' wrong? Shut up I know more than you. 
> 
> This is an inaccurate depiction of combat because in my actual VW run I used to send Claude to solo kill beasts on the reg. I love him he's too good of a unit. 
> 
> Had a lot of fun with Hilda and Lorenz going full “Detective Duo at The Beginning of Every Law & Order Episode Questioning a Vaguely Ethnic Dockworker About Strange Activity While He Loads Crates into The Back of a Van”. I think they’d make a great buddy cop pair. 
> 
> Caius: [IF I WENT AROUND SAYIN' I WAS ~~AN EMPEROR~~ A DUKE, JUST BECAUSE SOME ~~MOISTENED BINT~~ ANCIENT ELITE HAD LOBBED A ~~SCIMITAR~~ GIANT GLOWING BOW AT ME, THEY'D PUT ME AWAY!](https://youtu.be/FSbl16vTovU)
> 
> Next chapter is technically the last “main” one concerning this little adventure, and for that honour we’ll be popping back to Claude’s perspective! We’ve had some physical smackdowns, now it’s time for some political ones, and hopefully a nap.


	7. Claude II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Claude has a long chat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Claude “unprompted arson” von Riegan gets ready to have a completely civil discussion with the guy who tried to kill him. It’s a lot of political banter featuring…. lemme check my notes… yep… a lot of dads arguing. 
> 
> [godfather voice] you come into MY house… [check my vibes...](https://open.spotify.com/track/4MuoE4t1lp2Nkg7b2218Dr?si=kDhhGu93RUCkc1NJ4Uyqsw) on the day of my grandfathah’s funeral…

Claude could count the number of times he had prayed in Fódlan on one hand.

The first had been mass on the first day of academy classes. The house leaders had been expected to lead the opening prayers for the rest of the students, so Claude had spent an entire night researching protocol Edelgard and Dimitri likely knew by heart, just so he wouldn’t blow his entire flimsy cover on the first gods-damned day.

The words had felt heavy and false in his mouth, benedictions to a Goddess he doubted was even real, let alone listening. If he had been a more pious man in any respect, he probably would have felt quite blasphemous.

The second had been on the way back from Garreg Mach after it, and Teach, had fallen.

It had been small, untethered from any tradition of Fódlan or farther. It hadn’t been for anyone and in that way it had been for everyone. He had begged, silently and hopelessly, for the ear of any god—be they from Fódlan, Almyra, Duscur, Brigid… _somewhere_. Just for anyone to give him a sign that fate couldn’t _possibly_ be this cruel. There had been no answer.

The third, and most recent, had been the morning after his grandfather died. It had been the first prayer that was real—the one that brought Almyran words to his lips for the first time in over three years.

A younger, more wide-eyed Khalid had been taught what to say in these situations. He’d been taught by his paternal grandmother, who did not like him much but liked him slightly more than others, so she had been the one to take him to the temple and teach him the rites. In Almyra, a land of many, less well-defined gods, prayers were not so stringent in content. Where the faith of Claude’s mother had names and procedures for every delicately organised step of mass, the faith of Claude’s father, that prayed to the multitudinous gods of fate as much as it beseeched the essence of the land and sky, had fewer rules.

But there were _some_. Ones Claude barely paid attention to in his home country but had fallen into like a child into open arms after the passing of his grandfather, just for a fleeting moment.

“I don’t know if I’m ready,” he’d said to him the night before, sitting next to a deathbed that would, within a week, almost be his own.

“Life rarely waits for us to be ready, my boy,” Oswald had replied. “It’s all we can do to keep moving forward the best we can.”

Claude tightened his vice-grip on the old man’s hand. He’d still felt strong, yet the physicians had been confident he had no time left. It had felt like an injustice—a contradiction—that the dying man should feel stronger than the heir he was leaving behind.

“You’re all I have left here…” he’d said, and the only reason he’d voiced these thoughts at all had been the fact they were alone. “With you gone I’m… I have _no one_. No one else even knows my _name_ or—”

“Khalid.”

That had made Claude snap to attention. His grandfather had called him Khalid a grand total of once, when they had first met, to make sure he wasn’t mispronouncing it before telling him it would need to be replaced immediately.

How odd it had been, to realise how _foreign_ his own name could sound.

“Life has not been kind to you, that is plain to see,” Oswald had said, squeezing his grandson’s hand. “I am sorry that I am leaving you before I could see through making this place a home for you—as much as we may butt heads, my boy, that is one thing I truly wanted to do. I wanted to leave you in comfort.”

“Comfort is in short supply these days,” Claude had said. “You don’t have to apologise for anything.”

“Oh, but I do,” his grandfather had laughed, “I haven’t been the best duke… or the best father. I’m untrusting and grouchy and tired…”

Claude hadn’t known how to respond, so he hadn’t said anything. He’d just kept his eyes on his grandfather’s hands, pale and liver-spotted and so unlike his own, rather than his eyes, piercing and green and exactly the same as his.

“Listen, Khalid. You need to reach out, even if it’s just to one person,” Oswald had said. “For all your grand talk of crossing borders and unifying people you are mighty reluctant to enact such plans on a personal scale.”

Claude had bit back a scoff. It hadn’t been the place for an argument. “I can’t just throw all my cards on the table,” he’d said, hyperaware of the fact it sounded slightly like whining. “That’s not what you taught me; that’s not what _mom_ taught me... Earning respect is one thing… but…”

“But you have _friends_.” The way he’d spoken had been hushed but strong. “Political allegiance is earned, perhaps, but love between people is not. You cannot do this alone, and there are people out there willing to stand by your side, you just have to be willing to stand by theirs.”

Claude had laughed. “That’s pretty sentimental, old timer.”

“Hah! What else do you expect from a dying man?” He’d grinned and had reminded Claude so starkly of his mother it had been like an electric shock. “I’ve been stalwart for forty Goddess-damned years, you’d better allow me a few moments to be a sappy grandpa.”

He’d died in the night and Claude hadn’t been there. Later the story would be changed to say he had, because that was a nicer thought—albeit a less true one.

Claude had been awoken before dawn by a knock to his door and a servant had informed him in one swift blow that his grandfather had passed and the Alliance was his.

So, he had knelt in his room with the door tightly locked and the curtains drawn, the mourning bells of Derdriu howling up the hill to the halls of the estate. He’d curled in on himself on the floor, bringing his forehead nearly to the ground. To any outsider he would have looked to be in pain, with his gritted teeth and tears, clinging to his eyelashes like dewdrops on pine-needles. But his hands, clasped beneath him, had called this motion a prayer.

_Watch over me, you, fathers of my fathers and mothers of my mothers. Rest well in my wake and bless my fate, you, blood of my blood._

He didn’t pretend to know where his grandfather was now. There were so many different ideas with so many different peoples and nations to believe them. There was the religion he had grown up with but had never been treated well enough by to fully embrace, the one his hushed prayer had belonged to. There was the religion his grandfather had subscribed to, the one his mother had left behind, the one that turned its face from outsiders, the one his professor had started to uncomfortably pull from fiction to fact…

Sometimes he thought there wasn’t anything after you died. The cathedral he’d orbited for a year was just an empty stone building. The body in his family’s crypt was just an empty shell. The prayer he had whispered in the early hours of the morning had been heard by no one.

The man he’d begged too late for guidance was gone. He’d left his grandson behind with a bow he was too frightened to touch and a country he barely knew how to lead.

The slow ride back to the Riegan estate only took thirty minutes or so, but it felt like _hours_ to Claude.

The rhythm of his horse under him was bad enough for the lingering aches in his bones, but every loose cobblestone and pothole sent even greater shockwaves of pain through his _new_ wounds. He’d managed to grin and bear it up to this point, waving off Lorenz’s attempts to mother-hen him any more than he already was, but he wasn’t so self-destructive that he wouldn’t admit sitting down would be nice right about now.

Claude had been poisoned enough in his short life to know that this much activity was nothing but bad news, but he also knew he couldn’t afford to slow his pace. He’d dug himself quite a hole, and it was going to take some doing to get himself out of it.

No doubt Holst had long since arrived back at the estate and had told the other roundtable lords of what had occurred last night and this morning. That was going to be a mess, most likely. Gloucester would complain about Claude not clueing him into the assassination attempt immediately and Edmund would ask _so many_ questions and Ordelia would stand there with that I’m-Not-Angry-Just-Disappointed dad face that Claude’s own father had down to an art.

His grandfather’s voice came back to him.

_You cannot do this alone._

He _knew_ that, it was just the… _doing_ … that was hard. But he knew he had people he could trust, and he was confident his decision last night had been the right one. The assassin really could have been _anyone_. He wasn’t going to endanger his own life just to play happy family with the roundtable.

_You have friends._

_We’re not going to let it happen again, not on our watch._

He shot small, furtive glances at Hilda and Lorenz, flanking him on their own horses. They were squabbling over his head about something deliciously boring and light. It brought a smile to his face.

He’d found people to trust. Those special few. He’d hold onto them.

Today was probably going to get worse before it got better, but at least he had people by his side.

He was going to have to confront the roundtable lords before he confronted Edgar. They’d want in on the interrogation, of course. “Together or not at all” was the operative way most business of this calibre was handled in the Alliance, which got fair results most of the time, but was uniquely slow.

As much as he liked how open and collaborative the Alliance was, Claude did sometimes miss his father’s patented “because I’m the fucking king and I fucking said so” brand of diplomacy, if only for its efficiency.

But he couldn’t do that, not here, so he was going to have to try and not keel over in front of his friends’ parents and hope for the best.

“Claude!” Hilda snapped, making Claude jolt in his saddle. “Stop thinking so loud! I can’t concentrate!”

“Sorry,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“Are you stressed?” She cooed. “If it makes you feel better, this is definitely the most exciting funeral I’ve ever been to.”

Claude laughed.

“I aim to please.”

Judith met them at the gates.

“Happy hunting?” she asked. “You look like garbage.”

“We killed Caius,” Claude said, though she probably already knew, if Holst had come through here.

Judith just nodded. “Holst has wrangled a group to go search Edgar’s apartments. I have him sequestered in the Roundtable hall, by the way. He’s there when you want to talk to him, but I’d suggest making it snappy—”

She plucked at his ichor-soaked jacket.

“—This might earn some intimidation points with your little assassin, but it won’t look good at a funeral; you need a bath, boy.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Ordelia, Edmund, and Gloucester stood at the entrance to the stables, looking for all the world the grimmest welcome party Claude had ever seen. They stood there, glittering, in their black dress wear and armour, draped in sparse pickings of colour that showed their status, and stared him down.

“They do not look happy,” Lorenz observed.

“Why do I feel like we’re being dragged to Seteth’s office?” Hilda sighed.

Hilda’s observation was pretty accurate, but to Claude they looked more like a gaggle of pissed off dads than angry school administrators. He supposed that was actually… a fairly accurate description of all three men. He’d find time to laugh at that later.

Though Judith had seemed calm—even a little amused—the trio of roundtable lords rippled with bridled tension as they approached. Claude was not fool enough to believe the tethers would hold indefinitely.

“Good morning,” Claude called out, plastering the closest thing to a pleasant smile he could manage on his face. It was severely offset by all the beast blood, but he’d worked with worse. “Sorry for the wait, gentlemen, but some matters arose that needed our immediate attention.”

“Did the beast need disembowelling?” Ordelia stage-whispered to Edmund. He elbowed him.

Gloucester stepped forward; arms crossed.

 _“You,”_ he said in a low voice and _oh boy_ , yep, that wasn’t a good start.

“Ah,” Claude hopped out of his saddle, ignoring the twinge in his ribs as he drew himself up to his full height—he was still a lot shorter than Gloucester, but it was worth a try. “I assume Holst filled you in?”

“Indeed. He was _ever so kind_ as to inform us that you apparently spent last night bleeding out in the gardens, had your family’s relic stolen, and were nigh unreachable this morning because you were down at the docks _killing_ your steward…”

Claude sighed. “Yeah that about covers it—although I would have liked _not_ to kill him, but he got, uh…”

He looked to his friends.

“I think we should start calling it being _Miklan-ed_ ,” Hilda offered with a grin, dusting off her skirts as she dismounted her own horse. Lorenz sighed and followed.

“We’re not calling it that,” he said.

Hilda winked at him. “What about _Gautier-ed._ ”

“Sylvain would hate that, and you know it.”

“Like I care about Sylvain’s feelings.”

Claude sighed and turned back to the roundtable lords, who were looking at him expectantly. “Would you accept an apology?”

“No—”

“Yes,” Ordelia cut in, shooting Gloucester a glare. “Are you alright, Claude? Truly? It sounds like you went through quite an ordeal.”

Claude was once again struck by how much Ordelia seemed to ooze dad-energy in a way Gloucester and Edmund just _didn’t_. The hurt little boy deep inside him wanted to say ‘no’ to that question, an urge adult Claude beat down with a hammer.

“We’re fine—I’m fine,” he sighed. “I’d just like to get everything over and done with. I really do apologise for not clueing you all in sooner, but time was of the essence and… well…”

_I suspected all of you._

He didn’t regret that. Much. He wouldn’t apologise for it.

“You managed to recover Failnaught, I see,” Edmund asked. “Was anyone hurt?”

“No one besides us, as far as I know.”

“This is all well and good,” Gloucester interrupted, his tone indicating he found it neither well nor good. “But would you care to explain why you have one of my constituent lords locked in the Roundtable hall?”

Claude blinked. _What?_

“Oh, uh, Holst didn’t tell you that part?”

Gloucester raised an eyebrow. “No?”

Claude looked to Judith. “Why didn’t _you_ tell them?”

“Thought you might want to have this little parlour room scene all to yourself,” Judith said with a shrug. “It’s funnier that way.”

“You’re unbelievable,” Claude sighed fondly.

“Father.”

Lorenz stepped forward, cutting through the light mood. Gloucester turned to his son.

“We believe Edgar was the one who supplied the poison used last night,” Lorenz said. “I was the one who accused him, not Duke Riegan. Any qualms you have with his detainment should be qualms with me.”

Gloucester gawked and Lorenz kept talking.

“The substance used to poison the duke was a plant found in the territories along the Empire side of the Airmid River,” he explained. “It’s hard to distil and source, so we reasoned the culprit would have had to have been supplied from someone who had the connections and territory to smuggle Empire goods across the river. We’ve found evidence it was Edgar’s territory that was used.”

Claude was gawking too, now.

 _How many times are you going to have to hear them say they’re with you before you believe it?_ Said a voice in the back of his mind.

 _I never want to_ stop _hearing it,_ said another voice, small and desperate.

Lorenz affixed his father with an odd look, and his next words were quieter—surer. “Duke Riegan’s death would have ensured your succession as head of the Alliance, would it not?”

Gloucester’s eyes widened. “You’re implying—”

“I’m _implying_ that if someone saw custom as a plague, they may have thought your ascendency could have helped them correct some… perceived flaws.”

 _That was worded strangely,_ Claude thought. He reasoned it must have had some kind of private meaning between father and son, and apparently Ordelia and Edmund didn’t understand either because they merely shared a glance while Gloucester’s gaze burned.

Hilda chimed in. “So… In less poetic terms, we think Edgar wanted Claude out of the way so the southern lords would be free to give the Empire that territory you were planning to give them or whatever.”

It was a purposefully incendiary statement. Claude knew Hilda knew that was incorrectly accusatory, but he would admit it was amusing how both Lorenz and his father started protesting at exactly the same time. Ordelia spoke first, though.

“Oh, _Dorian_ ,” the dark-haired noble said in a disappointed tone of voice.

He shot Gloucester a glare that could only be described as withering. It was an eerily familiar admonishment, and it almost had Claude tensing in the same way he did when Lysithea started threatening bodily harm.

“I wasn’t going to _do it,_ ” Gloucester protested, sounding every bit as petulant as his son had on occasions he’d been called out by Teach. “They were nagging me about the secession for _months_ , you know that!”

“I didn’t know that,” Edmund interjected.

“Oh _quiet_ , Francis!”

Claude fought back a smile. If these were the sides of the roundtable lords he was going to get access to as leader—no longer just his grandfather’s substitute—he couldn’t help but think he might have a _little_ fun at these meetings.

“Why did they want Failnaught, though?” Edmund asked. “Why try and take the relic if all they wanted was you dead?”

“I don’t know if Failnaught was even part of Caius’s plan,” Hilda said suddenly, drawing all attention to her. “It was probably Edgar’s… or even Hubert’s, if he was really their contact in the Empire. He—”

She broke off to spare a glance at Lorenz, who mirrored her worried expression. There was something there Claude wasn’t privy to and it was piquing his interest.

“I honestly think Caius was just in it to kill Claude, maybe Edgar too, and Failnaught was just what the Empire was asking for in exchange for their help. Lorenz and I managed to talk to him before he went all—” she bared her teeth in a weak pantomime of a beast, “—and he… he had some pretty awful things to say about him.”

“What kind of things?”

Hilda shot him a capital-L Look. _Uh-oh._ “I don’t feel comfortable repeating it.”

Claude frowned. “What did he say, Hilda?”

“I concur,” Gloucester said. “I’d also like to know the motivations behind such an act.”

“Well fill in the blanks yourself!” Hilda shot back with an intensity no one had expected. She glared at Gloucester with cold eyes. “He was gross and awful and _selfish_. He thought Claude was going to drive us into war, but I’m not going to repeat what he said—” her gaze drifted to Claude, “—and you deserve more than having to hear me say it.”

Claude stayed silent.

 _How many times?_ The voice asked again.

Hilda started moving after that, shouldering past the gathered lords and marching towards the estate.

“Are we going to talk to him or not?!” She yelled without turning back.

Judith shrugged. “Might as well follow the lady.”

Claude spent the walk to the Roundtable hall trying to decide what he was going to do. He’d expected to have to deal with criminal cases at some point as the duke; he’d seen his father preside over enough of them to know it came with the territory of leading. He just hadn’t expected to have to do it three days into the job.

“Claude?” It was Lorenz, coming up at his side. He spoke in a hushed, concerned tone. “Are you well?”

“Yeah, I’m good,” Claude lied. “You?”

“I am fine,” Lorenz said. “I’m just checking in to see if you’re alright. What are you planning on doing?”

“You know me,” Claude grinned. “Probably something showy and irresponsible.”

“I will back you up. You have my word.”

“Really?” Claude couldn’t help but smile. “Because one of my plans was just to shoot at him until he confessed.”

He pet Failnaught on his shoulder like one would a small and fluffy animal. It felt wholly inappropriate, what with the weird humming and scary pulsing he was pretty sure only he could feel, but that wasn’t anything he couldn’t power through with humour.

Lorenz frowned. “As much as that is a truly _awful_ idea… I said you have my _word_ , Claude.”

Claude chuckled. “Okay. Okay.”

Lorenz fell back to his father’s side, and then they stopped walking.

The large oak doors to the Roundtable hall loomed before them, emblazoned with an exquisitely detailed carving of a pair of deer, antlers locked in frozen conflict. To push the doors open was to break apart their fight—to create peace just for a moment—while closing them represented their inevitable return to battle. It was a perpetual cycle of peace and conflict, a reminder of the vicious pattern of debate and compromise that the five lords submitted to time and time again in order to govern their nation.

“Alright,” Claude said, taking a deep breath. He shot a glance over his shoulder to the gathered nobles. “Don’t get mad.”

With no further warning, Claude kicked the doors open.

The first thing he noted was that it _really_ hurt. His knees would definitely be mad at him later, but for the purposes of dramatic effect there was nothing better. The doors swung open, revealing the lone form of Lord Edgar taking up space inside like a lost child. He was sitting in Gloucester’s seat at the table, looking rightly nervous, and he stood up with wide eyes when Claude entered. His gaze snapped from face to face as he catalogued each person in Claude’s little peanut gallery, and his face blanched.

“Good morning, Lord Edgar,” Claude drawled.

Edgar’s eyes went to Failnaught on his shoulder, and if Claude hadn’t been one-hundred percent certain Edgar had been behind his poisoning before now, the shade of _sickly-pale_ his face went at the sight of the relic cemented it for him.

“Did you have a good time at dinner last night, Lord Edgar?” Claude asked nonchalantly.

Edgar’s eyes flicked around the room, like he was trying to find the other shoe before it dropped. Whatever he saw in the faces of the group behind Claude didn’t seem to assuage anything.

“I, uh, y—yes, Your Grace,” he stuttered. “It was quite lovely. What is g—”

“That’s _great_ to hear,” Claude ignored him, slowly circling the table. The rest of the group filtered in. All of them kept their eyes on Claude as he spoke.

Judith shut the door. This did not go unnoticed by Edgar.

“I myself didn’t get to enjoy the dinner,” Claude said, dragging his hand along the table as he drew closer. Beast ichor began to run down his arms and streak onto the lacquered surface like black oil. “Do you want to know why?”

Edgar backed away just a little. “Y-Your Grace, what is this about?”

“I got _poisoned_ , Lord Edgar. I spent all of last night trying not to _die_ , and this morning I hauled myself down to the docks to stop my estate steward before he used it as an opportunity to make off with my family’s relic.”

Failnaught hummed. If Claude didn’t know better, he might have thought the thing sounded amused.

“But someone gave him the means to kill me, Lord Edgar. Someone with influence and connections and motive to want me ousted. We think we know who that person is.”

Edgar’s eyes didn’t leave his face.

The Alliance and Almyra were similar in a way—they respected victory and battle. For Almyra this was their culture, one of warriors and righteous violence. For the Alliance, it was a hidden thing not oft spoken of. The Alliance liked to fashion itself the least war-hungry of the three nations of Fódlan; it was a tricky place, and its power was consolidated, dominantly, by merchant families and old money that went to war with words and deceit rather than blades.

But they had once been families of the Kingdom. The ancient blood of northern warlords that ran through the veins of Faerghus’s warriors ran through theirs too. While they didn’t venerate battle in the same way as either of their neighbours, the lords of the Alliance knew to respect the weight of violence.

Edgar’s gaze tracked the trail of blood swiftly drying on the side of Claude’s face. Holst had been insistent on not cleaning up their less serious wounds, and Claude was realising it was a pretty smart—if dramatic—gesture. Edgar looked _terrified_. As much as Claude’s screaming limbs begged for him to sit down, he knew he must look quite a sight, dripping with his own blood and the ichor of a beast as he leaned up into Edgar’s personal space.

Back in Almyra, Claude’s green eyes had meant _outsider_ — _demon_ and _bad omen_ —but here in the Alliance, at the Roundtable, his green eyes meant _leader_. Blood around a leader’s eyes… anger boiling in the irises… what did Edgar see?

His mother and his grandfather and the cruel fate he’d been thrown into time and time again had taught Claude to be clever—to be political and tactical and smart—but it was his father that taught him, by example more than any direct lesson, how to be _commanding_.

“I am only going to say this once,” he said in a low voice, leaning close. All calm, no kindness. The air seemed to go still.

Claude was normally calm. But he knew there was a time and place for fire. That was a lesson his father had bothered to actually teach him. _If you make your anger a rare bird,_ he’d said, _it will be all the more striking when it is finally released._

He slammed his fist on the table and watched half the gathered nobles jump in his peripheral vision.

Claude was not his father. His father’s anger, though indeed rare, was a loud thing. Claude’s was quiet and still, like the surface of a lake, holding great and terrible depths beneath.

“Sit down, Lord Edgar,” he intoned. “I’m _not_ asking.” 

Something in this new mask changed Edgar’s mind, because the wind left his sails as quickly as it had entered them, and in an instant, he was back in his seat.

Claude relaxed a little and turned his attention briefly to the rest of the room. Lorenz and Hilda both gave him supportive nods, and Gloucester… well…

“Edgar,” Gloucester said. “The duke has some words for you. You would do well to sit and listen.”

Claude realised that Edgar had maybe been expecting sympathy from Gloucester when the lack of it sent the man’s face crumpling. He tried not to take pleasure in that. It was hard.

Edgar’s fists clenched. “If you have been… targeted, Your Grace, would it not do to be out looking for the culprit?”

Weak attempt. But admirable.

Lorenz, of all people, was the one that went first.

“It’s really quite a simple matter,” Lorenz said in a haughty voice that, for once, seemed to actually suit the mood. “But if you aren’t following, I will lay it out plainly for you. _You_ , Lord Evan von Edgar, are being accused of the attempted assassination of Duke Claude von Riegan, head of House Riegan and sovereign duke of the Leicester Alliance, as well as conspiring to steal the Hero’s Relic Failnaught. I suppose what the duke is getting around to asking is how you’re going to plead to those charges.” 

Edgar said nothing.

Lorenz’s face was a grim, sharp mask. “How do you plead, Lord Edgar?”

“Your claims are baseless,” Edgar scoffed. “I am _loyal_ to this country. Leave it to a group of upstart children to undermine—”

Hilda let out a sigh that could only be described as shattering, drawing the attention of just about everyone in the vicinity. She trudged forward, pulling the crumpled letter she’d grabbed from the Empire ship out from her bodice as she did.

“So slow! How do you people ever get things done!”

She trotted over to Claude’s side and slammed the paper on the table in front of Edgar. Claude wondered what his ancestors would think of all this beast goo on their nice hazel-wood table… or was it walnut? He’d have to check later.

“Okay so ‘E-D-A’, that’s you, right?” She didn’t wait for him to respond, too busy pointing out the right passages of the missive to highlight her words. “This is super incriminating isn’t it? But don’t worry, my brother is at your house right now getting even more evidence.”

Edgar paled as his eyes darted across the lines of the letter.

“Did you ever _meet_ Hubert von Vestra? Or were you just getting letters from the Emperor’s right hand man?” Hilda asked, leaning back on the table like it was a lounge. Claude stifled a grin. “Do you know if he still shaves his eyebrows? I always wondered why he did that…”

“I’ve known Holst his whole life, Edgar,” Judith said from her perch by the doors. “He’s persistent. If there’s evidence in your home I swear to you he will find it.”

Edgar looked away, but there was nowhere in the room he could look that wasn’t occupied by a scowling noble.

“Edgar.”

It was Gloucester that spoke.

Edgar’s brow furrowed. “My lord, I—”

“It’s over,” Gloucester said. “Will you plead?”

Claude tried to ignore how his heart felt like it was about to tremble out of his chest, and focused on Edgar instead, whose expression began a slow and steady descent into something like resignation.

“This was for the betterment of the nation,” he said finally. “You would have made a better head.”

“I never asked you to take such actions on my behalf,” Gloucester said. “What was this _for?_ The secession?”

“Not… entirely,” Edgar admitted through gritted teeth. “You _know_ he’s not ready for this.”

“ _He_ is standing right here,” Claude interjected. “Whatever problems you have with me, Edgar, I want you to say them to my face.”

He noticed Hilda wince in his periphery but kept his eyes on Edgar.

“You want to know my problems with you?” Edgar scoffed. “You’re closed-off and reckless and a child, how is that?”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“And that’s the real problem, isn’t it?”

Claude couldn’t help it. He felt his skin crawl. He did not like this situation, where his anger was bubbling away and the reins of the conversation were steadily slipping from his hands. He hated how Edgar was looking at him most of all, in a way that drew all his focus, with a hate that asked for all of him to _pay attention_. Fight or flight. His vision tunnelled until it was just the two of them. Edgar, sneering, and Claude feeling hot rage digging in his throat.

“You want to know what I think, Edgar?” he said suddenly, unable to keep it in any longer. “I think you exemplify everything wrong with this country. Backstabbing and cheating and lying to get ahead. We’re supposed to work _together_ —make decisions for a better whole—and you took it into your own hands. Why? Because you don’t _like_ me? Because you thought—correctly—that I wouldn’t tolerate you wanting to roll over and serve yourself up to the people we’re potentially at _war_ with to make yourself feel secure? You tried to kill me, and you endangered the lives of _my people_ to do it. You’re not loyal to the Alliance, Edgar. You’re loyal to yourself.”

He let the words hang in the air between them, and the other man was silent for a long time before speaking.

“You think they’re _your people_ just because of the name Oswald saw fit to let you keep?” Edgar laughed, and it was hollow and bitter. “You think you’re entitled to a seat at this table because of a crest? Because of a name? We have no clue who you are, Claude von Riegan. You’re resting on laurels that aren’t yours.”

He sneered up at Claude with hatred laid plain on his face. Claude knew that emotion intimately. It was the kind of hate he’d been seeing in eyes since he was old enough to know what hate was.

“You think you’re allowed to stand here just because your whore mother saw fit to _marry_ whatever backwoods _pig_ she ran off with before he—”

Edgar stopped talking after that, because a fist in your jaw tended to make it hard to keep talking, and Hilda had quite an arm on her.

Claude stumbled backwards as all five-feet-something-inches of Hilda grabbed him by the arm and shoved him. He caught the edge of the table and heard, rather than saw, the crack of bone as Hilda’s punch (very possibly) broke something important on Edgar’s face.

Judith ran forward and pulled her back almost instantly, with the roundtable lords aghast and Lorenz pale in the face and Judith—

Well, it was the happiest Claude had maybe _ever_ seen her look.

He looked at Hilda, at her pretty, painted lips drawn back into a snarl and all he could think of were shrikes—the beautiful butcher birds of the Almyran prairies. _You’re the second person to ever say that to me,_ he’d told her earlier. The second person to ever give him their loyalty, and all he could think was…

_What the fuck did I do to earn it?_

And,

_I want to feel this safe for the rest of my life._

Claude waited until Edgar had been escorted away and the doors were tightly shut before he collapsed into his seat.

The Riegan seat was green—like their eyes, maybe, Claude had never actually found out why—and the fabric upholstery was a coarse velvet. He knocked his head back against the headrest and took no comfort in it. Not when he was this tired.

“Duke Riegan.”

 _Woah, that’s more formal than usual,_ Claude thought. He dragged his eyes to Lorenz’s father.

Count Gloucester looked… glum. “I truly had no idea what Edgar was planning and… and his actions and words were beyond abhorrent. I apologise, as his liege lord I should have been more aware.”

_This is going weirdly well._

Claude sat up a little straighter, ignoring the twinge in his ribs. “Thank you, Count Gloucester—”

“But he raised some fair points.”

_Or not…_

Claude heard Ordelia groan, but Gloucester forged on.

“We don’t know much about you, that is a fact. It is… also a fact that you are now our head, so do you blame some of us for questioning your suitability?”

 _I blame you for killing my uncle,_ Claude thought. But, of course, he didn’t say it.

“Did you mean what you said to him?” Gloucester continued, and Claude saw Ordelia shoot him a questioning glance, too. “About what’s wrong with this country?”

“I did,” Claude says truthfully, because as angry as he had been, it had not made him a liar.

Gloucester sat up straighter and Claude mirrored him. “Then tell us what you think, Duke Riegan. We’re dying to know.”

Claude could have said something snippy then. He could have said he was tired, that he should be getting ready to bury his grandfather, that they should be adults enough to wait until the actual Roundtable to air their grievances at each other.

But he also knew he needed to do this.

Scouting the docks with Holst had been… interesting. There were echoes of Claude’s older brothers in the Goneril heir—refined, effective generals with a penchant for axes, racially charged violence, and far better facial hair than him—and it was enough to make Claude wary. Plus, he was Holst-motherfucking-Goneril; The horror stories Nader had told him about fighting the guy still occasionally haunted Claude’s nightmares.

 _House Goneril stands by you,_ he’d said. He’d meant it too; Claude was good at seeing liars.

But Claude wasn’t sure he’d still have his head on his shoulders if Holst knew who he was, so he had been hesitant to return to return the offers of friendship on the basis that they were almost definitely conditional. Holst’s affection was being offered to _Duke Claude von Riegan_ , not to _Prince Khalid Al-Almyra, the Undying._

Yeah, no. That wouldn’t go over well.

It didn’t mean the guy wasn’t a dispenser of pretty good advice. It didn’t mean Claude hadn’t listened.

“You’re worried about what they’re going to think of you, aren’t you?” Holst had said, trailing his way down the docks. “You think they’ll see you as being weak?”

“I—”

“This kind of shit comes with the job, kid. It’s more detrimental to the function of the nation if you collapse and die in a garden because of your pride than if your colleagues see you injured. You know that, right? The roundtable can be pretty dog-eat-dog, Claude, but efficiency reigns supreme here.”

“I knew it was someone at the dinner, though. I couldn’t trust anyone.”

Holst had sighed. “I’m not asking you to trust them Claude, because they sure as hell aren’t going to trust you,” he’d said. “But you need to respect each other. You need to give them a reason to believe in you. You need to show them you’re not a child.”

Claude sat up straight, affixing Gloucester, then Ordelia, then Edmund with his best serious stare.

“I meant what I said—truly, I did,” he said, drawing the words from somewhere deep inside. “All we have is each other. We’re all leaders, with our own opinions and beliefs, and those will clash more than they align, so we compromise. We meet on a level playing field and we work together, not under the behest of a single person’s will, but as a united front.

“I am not asking you to like me. I’m just asking you to listen to me when I say I may not have been born in these walls, but this is my home, and those people out there—” he points out the window, where the city of Derdriu sprawls out around them, “—are my people. I want to work with you to protect them.”

He sighed.

“We can argue and fight all we want but we can’t let ourselves break like this. Break like Edgar did. We have to be united, because the next years of our lives are going to be some of the hardest.”

It was Gloucester that spoke first, of course. “Unity alone won’t keep the Empire at bay,” he said, but his voice was milder than Claude expected.

“No,” Claude conceded, “but if we continue to push for neutrality then it will keep her at a distance.”

The personal nature of the “her” did not go unnoticed. A ripple of recognition passed through the older attendees, sending them glancing from Claude to Hilda to Lorenz in quick succession.

 _That’s right,_ Claude thought, _are we still just upstart children in your minds? We’re the only ones here who have seen action. We’re the ones who lived and ate and studied alongside the enemy._

Hilda seemed to understand what the shift in attention meant and stepped forward. “Edelgard is aiming for conquest,” she said, “but she’s not at a point where she’ll just… burn and pillage her way through us. She’s an imperialist bitch, but she’s been raised to be a proper little lady about it. We can predict that.”

“She’ll be looking for a reason to call us enemies. Maintaining our ties to Faerghus and the Empire may have seemed fine for the past year, but it won’t be from here on out. I know you want tariffs on Faerghus, and I agree actually, as much as that might be hard to believe.” Claude didn’t miss the flicker of surprise on Gloucester’s face at his statement. “But we need to sever _everything_. Adrestia too. We need to isolate fully.”

“Isolate?” Gloucester repeated. “We do nothing? We’re a small nation, Riegan. The south _relies_ on Adrestia.”

“Adrestia is primed to _destroy_ us if we get involved, Count Gloucester. It’s primed to destroy _you_. If we keep our heads down, we will be able to delay our involvement in the conflict.”

“You assume we wish to keep standing against the Empire in the first place.”

“I’m not asking you to stand against her, Count Gloucester, I’m asking you to not ally yourself with her. There’s a difference here and I really do think that difference will save lives.”

“How long is this plan viable?” Gloucester asked. “Eventually Her Majesty will see non-involvement as non-compliance.”

“Eventually. But neutrality buys us time.”

“Time for what?” Edmund asked, finally speaking up. His question cut through the room like a knife.

That was a good question.

Some addled part of Claude’s brain said _a miracle_ and some hopeful part of it thought of impossibly green hair and a sword of legend, but he didn’t voice any of those thoughts.

What he ended up saying was: “A chance.”

The answer didn’t please Gloucester, no matter how true it was. “Ordelia and Gloucester will not lie down and act as breakwaters in wait of this “chance” of yours, Riegan,” he said.

There was a scoff from Ordelia, who Claude now realised had _somehow_ remained seated though all the madness. He aimed a discerning eye at Gloucester. “Don’t presume to speak for me, Dorian.”

Gloucester whirled on him. “Should I not, Rhys? The boy wants us to withdraw into ourselves like the cowards others take us for! We must choose a side and I for one don’t want to pick one led by _rabid dogs_ still loyal to a dead boy-king.”

Claude saw Hilda and Lorenz bristle, he credited only the fact every muscle he had was nearly shaking with fatigue that he didn’t do the same.

“The _boy_ has a point,” Ordelia replied, flicking a glance to Claude before continuing. “The Emperor is still building momentum. When her beast of war is ready to be unchained it will target the biggest threat it sees, and under a fully neutral front we will not be that threat.”

“So, we bide our time? For what? For our slaughter? We withdraw and _starve_ our people so they can die later instead of ensuring their safety now?”

Lorenz spoke up. “Father—”

Gloucester put up a hand.

“I will see you all at the ceremonies soon,” he said shortly. “I am done here. We will speak more on this tomorrow.”

Ordelia sat there for a moment in silence, letting Gloucester’s words echo and fade through the chamber. He got to his feet calmly, before turning his steely, pale eyes on Claude.

“You’re right, Duke Riegan. Leicester does not belong to one person,” he says. “It is our people’s—our children’s, too.”

He stepped forward, making his way towards Claude as he kept speaking. “True neutrality… it’s a nice idea. I will not roll over for them, you’re right… but I will not let my daughter starve, either.”

His meaning began to sink in. “Count Ordelia, I—”

“You looked after her, Claude,” he said quietly, laying a stilling hand on Claude’s arm. It was a strange, unexpected gesture. “For that I will be eternally grateful.”

“You led her well,” he continued, his words only for them. “She speaks of you often. She’d loathe me to say it, but she does look up to you. I don’t think I can stand with you in the way you want me to, but… a breakwater? That I might be able to be… for a time.”

Ordelia’s hand, gentle on his arm, was like a vice. Claude found himself remembering the coast back home, white sand beaches that stretched for miles and miles in every direction with dunes as high as castles. He remembered the coastal settlements, protected from raging waves by ships, deliberately sunk to catch the brunt of the oncoming swell.

Breakwaters, ones that would get smaller and smaller every year. Bruised and battered until they were nothing. Until new destruction would take their place.

That wasn’t what he wanted at all.

Ordelia nodded politely to the others in the room before following Gloucester out.

As soon as the doors shut, Hilda sank into her father’s chair, ichor streaking down the dark upholstery, and groaned.

Lorenz leaned his weight against the table, letting out a shaking breath.

“Well that could have gone better,” Claude murmured, letting his head fall back onto the table with a dull thud.

“No, I think you might have passed muster on that one, boy,” Judith smiled. “Those two have always been needlessly dramatic. The fact they let you know they disagree at all is enough of an endorsement.”

“And now you have a whole week to convince them otherwise,” Edmund said assuredly, smile audible. “Nothing ever gets solved quickly around these parts, Riegan. Honestly? If you’d managed to sway those fools with just a few pretty words I might have had to start praying to someone else.”

“Pretty words?” Claude huffed, turning his head to look at Marianne’s father sideways. “I’ll have you know I meant every one of them, Margrave.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Edmund replied. “And I find myself agreeing with many of them. But that doesn’t change the fact they were very pretty.”

He drummed his fingers on the table, filling the silence.

“Well,” he said shortly. “Dorian was right in that we can pick this up tomorrow. Preferably _after_ you’ve had a bath and… perhaps been healed again? Are you sure you’re alright?”

Marianne was only ever stern in situations where her classmates were hurt and not listening to her, and the appraising scowl she’d put on was always foreign on her face. Right here and now, though, Claude realised where she’d picked it up from. He chuckled.

“Absolutely not,” came his reply. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a horse… two horses, maybe.”

“You need a nap,” Hilda said. “Me too. Lorenz, you want a nap?”

“I wouldn’t mind a rest,” Lorenz said. “But I’m quite sure the funeral starts in under an hour.”

“Ugh.” With the adrenaline gone Claude could feel himself getting dangerously close to crashing. He was… _so_ tired.

But then he remembered the prayers he and whispered days before. He thought of his grandfather, on the off chance he was watching over them now. Rest well in my wake, the prayers said—a wish for the ancestors to find peace while the living continued without them.

Rest would be nice right about now. But Claude still had work to do.

They were coaxed into baths after that. The weariness of the last twenty-four hours soaked fully into Claude’s bones all at once as the hot, steaming water enveloped his aching limbs. It was probably only due to Lorenz physically holding him up that he didn’t fall asleep and drown right then and there.

They changed into the closest things to traditional funeral-wear they could scrounge, which wasn’t hard; a lot of Riegans had been dying in the last few years and there was a surplus of mourning garb around the place.

The ceremony was nice, though the prayers slipped around Claude’s fatigued brain like water over stone. Judith helped him stay standing for it with a firm-yet-gentle hand on his arm and a quiet whisper in his ear that _if he keeled over and died right here she’d resurrect him so she could kill him again herself_ and that, more than the hand, kept him upright.

He didn’t pay too much attention. He’d already said goodbye.

He left afterwards, and if it was too quick then Gloucester held his tongue and Ordelia only smiled and Edmund minded his business. Holst squeezed Hilda’s shoulder as she flanked her friend and Judith nodded at Lorenz as he looped his arm through Claude’s.

They walked back to Claude’s room, taking the short route from the chapel that took them through a garden with yellow roses. Claude closed his eyes almost the whole way, focusing on the aches that had finally caught up with him—on the hands that were guiding him and that, maybe more importantly, he was _letting_ guide him.

And if Hilda and Lorenz left—or if they stayed with him in this big lonely room and a bed too big for one person—he didn’t know and wouldn’t until morning. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

The Roundtable conference was oddly short, all in all, spanning three days rather than the usual five. But maybe that was to be expected when most of their dirty laundry was pre-aired in one fell swoop at the top of the whole thing.

Silver linings.

Their ultimatum was grim. A tense concession of trade routes. The Alliance, for all the kicking and screaming against the idea, would be isolating itself from all its neighbours. Not as much as Claude would have liked, but in the end they’d still be clinging to their neutrality.

It was an odd sort of irony that Claude was the one pushing so fervently for isolation and it wasn’t lost on him. It was the thing he hated most about Fódlan as a whole—the isolation and inward focus that made the entire continent the racist watering hole it was. Isolation was what he’d come to Fódlan to _end_ , but here he was acting as its staunchest supporter, forgoing his beliefs because neutrality was what was going to keep his people _alive_.

His father had told him that once—that war made men their own worst enemies—that knives at your people’s throats was enough to make liars and beggars and self-traitors out of just about anyone. He’d told him a lot of things like that. Not for the first time, he wondered if he should have listened more.

So, the Alliance would draw back… shut its doors… and in return? Unrest. Distaste and disagreement. The whispering threat of civil war hung in the roundtable hall long after its doors were closed.

Claude would make them fade into the background, draw the attention off themselves. If they had to turn their back to the world to do that, then maybe that was just the sort of liar Claude could be.

“It won’t last.”

Claude stared down at his reflection in his tea as he spoke, his own face looking back at him all wavering and tired. It was Almyran Pine Needle, which had made him almost laugh out loud when Lorenz had set the damn thing in front of him. _It’s your favourite,_ he’d said, stating a fact like it wasn’t both charming and weird that he remembered stuff like that despite not having seen his former house leader in a year.

“I know.”

Lorenz didn’t look up from his own tea as he tossed out a snappy acknowledgement. He stirred it quietly, without his spoon touching the sides of the cup. He made a sort of gentle production out of tapping the tea off the spoon and laying it back down on his saucer, the sound ringing through the estate’s central garden.

Claude waited until they’d both taken a sip to keep talking. “Either they tear us apart or we do it for them,” he said. “It’s starting to look a bit fruitless.”

Lorenz scoffed. “I thought _I_ was supposed to be the pessimist here,” he chided. “Keep talking like that and I’m afraid I’ll be out of a job.”

Claude laughed. “Sorry, buddy.”

Lorenz hummed, narrowing his eyes. He looked a lot like his dad when he did that and Claude would know, having been staring down the barrel of Count Gloucester’s disapproval for the last three days. But Lorenz’s gaze, while scrutinizing, wasn’t disapproving or condescending. That was one of the things Claude enjoyed about Lorenz as he’d gotten older—the guy had grown the ability to be critical without being a _complete_ jackass about it.

“Say we’ll be okay,” he said suddenly. Claude blanched, smiled, and rolled his eyes.

“You don’t believe that.”

“No,” Lorenz conceded. “But _you_ should. So say it.”

Claude paused for a moment before saying, “We’ll be okay.”

_And hey, who knows? Maybe we will be._

“There we are,” Lorenz said, unable to keep the fondness out of his haughty tone. “That’s the idiot I’m friends with.”

With the tension broken, Claude found it easier to smile. “Aww… we’re friends?”

“The fact you have to ask after I patched your internal organs back together is concerning.”

“Nah, don’t worry, I know. I just like hearing you say it.”

Lorenz rolled his eyes and took another sip of tea, his gaze dragging to something over Claude’s shoulder.

Claude heard Hilda coming from a mile away, her impractical heeled boots crunching through the grass behind him, but he let her sneak up on him anyway. Two soft, slightly-cold hands snaked up to cover his eyes and he smiled.

“Guess who?” she cooed in a sing-song voice. Claude made a show of gasping.

“Lady Death?!” He stage-whispered, and he heard Lorenz scoff has he brought his own, shaking hands up to hold Hilda’s. “Here at last to lay her cold, clammy hands upon my mortal s—ouch!” 

Hilda pinched his eyebrows, making him squawk.

“Don’t call me cold and clammy! I’m delicate!”

He spun around, smacking her hands down again before she could get more pinch-y. “You just pinched me!”

“Yeah! With my _delicate_ hands!”

Hilda sunk into the chair they had left free for her and opened the teapot lid, sniffing the inside and making a face.

“Aw, I don’t like Pine Needle tea,” she whined.

“We know,” both men said.

She poured herself a cup anyway.

“You both look like shit,” she observed. Claude laughed while Lorenz winced.

“Apparently that’s what politics does to you. I’m worried I’m going to be grey by thirty at this rate.”

Hilda sighed. “With a conference _that_ stressful I can only imagine.”

“You weren’t even _there_ ,” Lorenz said with a raised eyebrow.

“No, I wasn’t,” Hilda sighed again, stirring honey into her tea with far more clanging than Lorenz had. “Apparently going around punching nobles in the face doesn’t get you a lot of return invitations, but Holst told me.”

They talked for a while longer of frivolous things, not about politics, for once, which Claude couldn’t help but appreciate. They talked until the conversation turned to goodbyes. Soon Hilda would be returning home with Holst, and Lorenz back to the south with his father. Claude wondered when he’d see them again… the thought of being alone in the house again unnerved him some.

He hummed, looking down at his tea, and smiled.

“We’re still meeting up for the Millennium Festival, aren’t we?”

Lorenz shot him a withering glance. “Are you quite serious?”

“Deadly serious,” Claude grinned. Lorenz pouted.

Hilda giggled and reached over to tug on Lorenz’s shirt sleeve. “C’mon, Lorenz! We made a promise!”

“Yes, _before_ the continent was plunged into war.”

Claude hummed over the last dregs of his tea. “War has never stopped a party before.”

“I’d argue war is notorious for stopping parties.”

“Well then we’ll just have to change that,” Claude sighed happily. He leaned backwards in his chair, bracing his knees on the underside of the table so he was looking out over the garden upside down—earning a strangled “please stop that” from Lorenz that was more valuable than gold. “My first motion as Duke Riegan shall be sweeping party reform.”

“Please sit up. You’re going to give me a heart attack.”

From this angle the whole world was twisted and spun into something new. The bright bushes and trees, run through with sparks of colourful flowers, clung to a ceiling of green grass, swaying like the lowest leaves in the canopy of a great tree. The sun, which was previously sinking low in the afternoon, now rose and rose to meet the warm stone towers of castle. A world on its head.

A change in perspective, a motion so simple, creating something never seen before.

Claude sat up straight and hoisted himself forward so he was leaning on the table, planting his chin in his hand to grin at Lorenz.

“It’s going to be a great party,” he said. “You’ll feel so left out if you miss it.”

Lorenz sighed. “You truly are intent on this… aren’t you?”

“What can I say?” Claude chuckled. “I have a good feeling.”

Lorenz made a noise. “A _feeling_ …”

Hilda chimed in then, her voice laced with amusement. “I don’t know, Lorenz, maybe we should give him a chance! His ‘feelings’ normally work out.”

“I guarantee to you, Hilda, that I could name at least ten distinct instances where they most definitely _didn’t_.”

“You gotta have a little faith, Lorenz,” Claude drawled, punctuating ‘faith’ with a little wiggle of his fingers in a bad approximation of the motions of Physic. “Aren’t you supposed to be good at that now?”

“I could have left you out here to die, you know,” Lorenz huffed.

Claude smirked. “But you didn’t.”

Hilda sipped at her tea. “So… are you going to come? Or—”

“Of course I’m going to come!” Lorenz snapped. “Don’t be daft!”

Hilda let out a bright little giggle.

And Claude realised then, surrounded by flowers and friends, that he wouldn’t give this up for anything.

He wondered if he should tell them that—he didn’t have the most experience in this sort of thing. He honestly didn’t think he’d ever get this _far_ in a friendship… let alone with people from Fódlan. So should he tell them? Should he tell Hilda that she made him feel safe and wanted? Should he tell Lorenz he challenged him in a way that didn’t make him afraid? Should he tell them that they made him feel at home in this place?

It seemed unnecessarily vulnerable. But then again, maybe it wasn’t something he needed to say out loud. Maybe it was enough for Hilda to give his knee a reassuring squeeze under the table when talk turned dark, it was enough for Lorenz to refill his cup without him even having to ask, and it was enough for him to smile at them, and for the smile to be real.

“I hope you know I wouldn’t miss it for the world either, Mister Leader Man,” Hilda said brightly when the talk turned back to the Millennium Festival. Claude rolled his eyes.

“Okay, we’re going to have a _long_ conversation about you calling me that.”

Hilda batted her eyelashes up at him in a wholly unconvincing manner. “Whatever’s the matter with it, Mister Leader Man?”

“It’s _awful_.”

“It’ll catch on.”

“It won’t.”

The hills of Derdiru no longer rang with mourning bells.

Instead, they rang with the summer winds, warm and strong. they rang with the laughter of the city's youth—of its leaders—of its future; just for that moment pretending nothing had changed at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes they DO re-upholster the chairs if a new house enters the five. Yes it IS pretentious and costly.
> 
> That’s (almost) all folks! The next chapter is a short epilogue (bonus points if you can guess what it’ll be) but other that that, we’re done! It’s been so fun to write this and see you all enjoying it! This is the first multi-chapter fic I’ve finished since 2018 I’m riding a high like no other (even if I wasn’t entirely happy with this chapter but shhhh I rewrote it like three times lets just take it)
> 
> I was fretting about putting Claude's full title in this when I found an opportunity to but then I remembered about 80% of the characters in this game are named "[insert name here] from [insert place here]" so... Khalid al-Almyra. doesn't roll off the tongue great but neither does "von Varley" so let's not throw stones in glass houses. "The Undying" moniker is... something else... but I'm planning on maybe including it in another fic so... we'll wait...
> 
> As much as we might like this to have a fun political resolution it was never going to happen. This is more of a “how did the Alliance get to the nigh-civil-war state it’s in post-timeskip?” rather than a fixer-upper story. What we get told about the war-phase Alliance is that it’s really just barely being held together under a crumbling shroud of neutrality—the Deer have to swerve Lorenz’s dad HARD so they can use spicy guerrilla tactics™ to burn down Acheron’s house and snag Myrddin back… that is… not the sign of an under control nation. So Claude is implicitly out here duct taping a country together for 5 years like the champ he is, and it doesn’t get better until it gets much worse. 
> 
> Here’s a little breakdown of what happens after: 
> 
> Edgar is soundly convicted and imprisoned like the little dingus he is. Judith attends every day of the trial for fun and sits front row with snacks and no one is brave enough to ask her not to eat during court proceedings. Though Claude and Co. are pretty sure Acheron was in on the assassination attempt, Edgar takes the fall for the whole thing, so he lives to have his house burned down another day.
> 
> After legal channels dry up, Acheron sides with the Empire and allows them to occupy Myrddin Bridge, a move that only heightens the increasing stress on the southern territories. Gloucester and Ordelia, true to their word, formally ally with the Empire after pressure gets too high, a decision that angers just about every other lord in the Alliance.
> 
> Claude spends the next year or two attempting to gently play up these heightened internal conflicts in order to make the Alliance a less attractive target for the Empire’s Ghastly Machine Of War, which works! It’s during this time that Lysithea and Marianne become more involved in their territories and start attending roundtables with Claude and Lorenz which Oh No Miss Emperor This Is Definitely Not A Way For Claude’s Inner Circle To Secretly Start Plotting Oh No Not At All!!
> 
> Hilda doesn’t come to roundtables anymore but when Claude’s mysterious new retainer shows up with rose-scented travel permits stamped with a Goneril seal you can be sure as shit it wasn’t Holst that signed them.
> 
> Anyway! Cheers for coming on this ride! I'll see you in a few days with the epilogue, but until then thanks for reading!!


	8. Epilogue: Tiana

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the desk of Tiana, Queen of Almyra.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> absolutely zero impulse control so have this now. 
> 
> [vibe shattering check](https://open.spotify.com/track/20svOpmCQao5GUBgSu8zDe?si=fiiVADG1Sj6oXZEHMREFnQ)

_Nader,_

_Get your ass back to the capital. I have a job for you._

_Much love,_

_Tiana._

* * *

_KHALID._

_WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU WERE POISONED? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THAT IS NOT SOMETHING YOU TACK ONTO THE END OF A LETTER AS A “BY-THE-WAY”! I HAVE HALF A MIND TO MARCH ACROSS THE THROAT AND DRAG YOU HOME MYSELF. YOU ARE A STUPID AND SIGHTLESS CHILD AND I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU ARE STILL STANDING. DO YOU GET OFF ON PUTTING YOURSELF IN HARMS WAY? ARE YOU OKAY?_

_I need all the details RIGHT NOW. Do you know who did it? Are they dead yet or do you still need to kill them? Do you need me to send someone to kill them? I CAN DO THAT! I think Nader is free at the moment and I’m sure he won’t mind if I ask him to head over. If he does mind I’m okay with forcing him! I threw him off a balcony once and I can do it again. You should ask Judith! I’m sure she could spare someone! Please be responsible!_

_Assuming this letter hasn’t been delivered to your_ _ CORPSE _ _I suppose I will start by thanking you for your sympathy. I will mourn my father’s passing, but I loved him where you had no obligation to. I made my decision all those years ago, a decision that meant whatever children I bore would not know him in the same way I did. My choice meant I would never truly be able to give you a grandfather or an uncle as I had, and I mourn the loss of that experience almost as much as I mourn their deaths. Do not fret. What you feel will always be right._

_I am very glad you have friends there to support you. You have no idea how much it continues to warm my heart to hear you have found people who care for you in Fódlan, and that you can care for too. Even if one of them is a Goneril._

_(Remind me to write a longer note on that later)_

_The Gloucester boy sounds smarter than his father! I do give good advice! My advice for you is to keep your friends close to you. I was one of the people who pushed you to see people for their usefulness, but I will be the first to say it is not the only way to live. Though it was a vital skill for survival I will admit I do regret not teaching you the opposite. That for as much as you should surround yourself with people whose skills will help you, you must also surround yourself with people who make you happy. Once you have those people you must cherish them, lest you lose them. I am glad you’ve found those people._

_In regards to your future, as uncertain as it seems, you would do well not be frightened, my love. You are intelligent and strong-willed, and you have noble goals. You have people who support you, too, and that’s the most important thing. You don’t need to be alone in this._

_What little we hear of the war is dire, so I want you to know I won’t hold it against you if you want to come home if things become too dangerous. I can’t say that others would see such a retreat as anything but cowardly… in fact I’d almost guarantee it… but I swear that you will always have a place here. I’ll make sure of it._

_Regardless, you have weathered storms before. These are trying times, but you can weather this. I can say with confidence as his daughter that your grandfather would not be disappointed in you, in the same way myself and your father are not. We’re proud of the man you’re becoming, and I know my father would be, too._

_Speaking of your father, he says hello and sends his love, as do the girls. Your brothers have nothing constructive to pass on, as usual, but you should know that when Amir heard you were rubbing elbows with the Gonerils he snapped the hilt off his sword and I only wish I could capture the exact shade of red he turned in writing._

_I want you to know that no matter what I love you unconditionally, my dear Khalid. You are my son, the stars in my sky, so I ask that you please be careful—A starless sky is not one I wish to live under._

_Sending good fortune over the mountains,_

_Forever your loving mother,_

_Tiana._

_PS: I’m serious. Do you need me to kill someone for you?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiana is like “I take a very hands off approach to parenting” right up until Claude is in life-threatening danger and then she’s like [pulls out a glock]
> 
> Most of my ending notes were in the last chapter, soo.... That's all folks. Love you lots! Thank you so much for coming along on this ride!

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @fizzityuck, twitter @claregormy, or in the sewers, conducting dark dealings with the twinks below.
> 
> thanks for reading 💖


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